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Gracey's Oatline Missionary Series. 




OUTLINE MISSIONARY SERIES 



INDIA 



Wmmmtmw§ Wmmw'^^^ X^immimmmi 



BY 









Jt-T. gracey, 

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[Seven years Missionary in India : Member of the American 
Oriental Society.] 



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J. T. GRACEY, Rochester, N. Y. 
SCRANTOM, Wetmore & Co., lo State St., Rochester, N. Y. 

1884. 



COPYRIGHTED 

BY J. T. GRACEY 
1884 



[Bunnell & Oberdorf, Printers, Dansville, N. Y.] 






C4. 



CONTENTS. 



PART I. 

India : extent, resources, climate, physical features Population 

and government, village republics. -Ethnology : Turanians, 

Aryans, Semitic Peoples. Languages of India. — — India's 

Place in History : The Prize of the East, India the Key 

to Asia : Internal History. Social Order : Caste and its 

principles. Social changes and progress. ^ Religions : (i) 

Aboriginal superstitions. (2) Hinduism : Sacred books, phil- 
osophy, fetishism, a moral failure, degrades woman. (3) Buddhism. 
(4) Parsi-ism. (5) Muhammadanism. (6) Karens. (7) Sikhs. 
MAP of India vnth political divisions and railroads. 

" of Languages of India. 

' ' of Burmah and its Missions. 
DIAGRAM of comparative populations. 

" of comparative grov^th of Christian community. 

TABLE of population according to religions. 

PART II. 

Evangelization of India. Syrian Christians. Roman Catho- 
lic Missions. Early Protestant Missions : Ziegenbalg, Schvv^artz. 



IV CONTENTS. 



-Later Protestant Missions: Carey, Judson, Dufif. Growth of 



Modern Missions. — Native Christians. Self-Support. Secret 

Semi-Christians. Quasi-Christian Communities.—- — Native An- 
ticipation of the Triumph of Christianity.— — Mass Movements 
toward Christianity ; or Revivals among Santals, Shanars, in On- 

gole, Tinnevelly, Arcot, — Native Christian Leaders. Woman's 

Work. Reforms: by Government ; amongst Hindus. Brah- 

moism. Opinions of Eminent Laymen on Missionaries and their 

work. Hindrances to Christianity. The Hour: Its peril, 

privilege and duty. Appeal of the Decennial Conference at Cal- 
cutta. 

DIAGRAM of population according to religions. 
TABLE of missionary societies at work in India. 

" of Localities occupied by Missionary Societies. 
STATISTICS of (i) Protestant Native Christians, churches, schools. 

(2) of Roman Catholic missions. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



AUTHOR'S NOTE. 



This "Outline Missionary Series," on several Missionary fields, 
for use amongst all denominations of Christians, is designed to serve 
pastors, Sunday school and missionary workers, and others, as an 
introduction to that systematic study of missions which ought to be 
considered a necessary part of religious education. In many ways 
these small volumes will be valuable as hand-books to missionary 
workers. 

India has a complex civilization and hetereogeneous peoples. 
This is therefore an outline of the more prominent features only. 



The methods of Romanising oriental spellings are various and 
confusing. If the latest of these had been followed strictly, many 
names would not be recognized in this country, and the writer would 
appear pedantic. No one system has been strictly adhered to in 
this book. 



It is impracticable to acknowledge indebtedness specifically to the 
authorities which sustain the statements of this little volume. In the 
chapter on Language, Bishop Caldwell, an able and scholarly author, 
has been followed. The grouping is made merely to facilitate the 
use of the Map of Languages. The statistics of that author are 
based on the Census returns of 1872. 



The statements of authorities on statistics of population, etc. , are con- 
flicting. Even the Census of the British Government has been shown to 
be in error. The entire Census returns ai'e said by Rev. Mr. Craven 
of Lucknow to give a population of 263 millions. The Diagram on 



VI AUTHOR S NOTE. 

p. ,185 gives a total of 253,891,801. Mr. W. W. Humber gives a 
total for all India and British Burma (exclusive of Ceylon) of 255,- 
073, 753. His statistical tables are the most definite at our command. 
They are for 188 1. 



On p. 14 the Moslems of India are said to represent the Semitic 
races and their civilization. The more technical statement of their 
Ethnic relations is hinted at on p. 91. Those who are fastidious 
about exact correspondence in numerical statements of the total Mu- 
hammadan population of India, can substitute "fifty" for "forty" 
on each of the pages referred to. The Census for 1882 would give 
over 50 millions, but the confused religious condition of the popula- 
tion of Lower Bengal referred to on p. 92, shows that the religious 
classification cannot be more than approximately correct. 



The author has not been so situated as to be able to read the final 
proofs of this volume. Some typogi^aphical errors were discovered 
too late to make necessary corrections in the text : e. g. "Annie" for 
Ann Judson p. 109; "Zend Aresta" for Zend A vesta p. 86, 
" South " for North-Western Provinces p. 19 ; After the word "pop- 
ulation " seventh line from the bottom of p. 189 the words "of a 
territory larger than all Europe " should be stricken out. 



PART 1. 



''''From India even unto Ethiopia^ — Esther i : i. 



''''And he said unto 7ne^ go a?id behold the wicked abom- 
inatioTis they do there. So I we?it in and saw ; and 
behold every form of creeping things^ and abominable 
beasts^ and all the idols * * * portrayed 

upon the wall round aboutP — Ezekiel viii : 9, 10. 



" When they kneiv God, they glorified him not as God. 
* * * Professijig themselves to be wise., they 
became fools ; and changed the glory of the incorruptible 
God into an image made like to corruptible man., and to 
birds., and four footed beasts, and creeping things. * * 
For this cause God gai'e t/iem up unto vile affectionsTx 
Romans i. 



INDIA. 



EXTENT, RESOURCES, CLIMATE, ETC 



India is not a country but a continent. It is 
bounded on the north by the snow-line of the 
Himalaya Mountains, and sweeps thence nineteen 
hundred miles to its most southern sea point 
Cape Comorin, It extends from east to west 
fifteen hundred miles. It covers an area of 1,474,- 
606 square miles. Excluding Russia, it is as 
large as all of Europe, and varies but little in its 
extent from that of the Roman Empire at its zenith. 

It is as large as the United States east of the 
Mississippi, and constitutes one-sixth of the terri- 
tory of the great British Empire. Including British 
Burmah it sweeps through thirty-two degrees of 
longitude and twenty-seven of latitude. 



2 INDIA. 

Physical Features. — The great plain known 
as Hindustan lies north of the range of iron and 
basaltic mountains called the Vindhya. The 
"south-land" or the Deccan, lying to the southward 
of this range of mountains, is a rugged table land 
girdled with hills varying from 1,500 to 7,000 feet 
in hight. The longest river of India is the Indus, 
sweeping with power through 1,800 miles. The 
Ganges flows 1,500 miles from the snow glaciers 
to the sea. The Irawaddy irrigates Burmah, and 
furnishes a water- highway from the Chinese Em- 
pire to the Bay of Bengal. 

The glaciers of the Himalayas far surpass those 
of the Alps. Their snow-peaks throw the loftiest 
shadow in " the cone of night." The passes across 
these ranges are 2,000 feet higher than Mont Blanc. 
This mountain mass extends for 1,500 miles in 
length and 150 miles in breadth and forms a bound- 
ary and a bulwark of India. From this snow-line 
with its sublimity, stability and solitude, the billow- 
ing ranges reach from fifty to sixty miles inward in 
lower ranges, amid the soft beauty of whose sides 



INDIA. 3 

are stations, like Simla, Mussoorie, Nainee Tal and 
Almora. The Ghats, about as high as the Alle- 
ghanies, extend round the point of the peninsula, 
set a little back from the sea. 

In northern India, about the loth of March 
the southwest monsoon begins to blow, and 
is a hot gale from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. and 
humanity roasts, grills or fries in a temper- 
ature, artificially reduced in the houses of Eu- 
ropeans, to 90° to 105° fah. ! In mid-June this 
is exchanged for the rainy season, the rain fall of 
which equals in four months that of a year in 
England. The heat continues, and people are 
boiled, stewed or fricaseed. From November to 
February Bishop Thomson thought the India 
climate fit for the "Angels of God." Yet the 
mean temperature of a year taken five times in 
the twenty-four hours in Madras registered 84°, 
and Agra is hotter than Madras. 

Resources. — Max MuUer has well said, " If 
I were to look over the whole earth to find out the 
country most richly endowed with all the wealth, 



4 INDIA. 

power and beauty that Nature can bestow — in 
some parts a very paradise on earth — I should 
point to India. * * jf y^^ ^^j.^ ^qj. geology, 
there is work for you from the Himalayas to 
Ceylon. If you are fond of botany, there is a 
flora rich enough for many Hookers. If you are 
a zoologist, think of Haeckel, who is just now 
rushing through Indian forests, and dredging in 
Indian seas, and to whom his stay in India is like 
the realization of the brightest dreams of his life." 
India yields untold wealth to the world ; she is a 
land of gems — the Koh-i-noor of the world. The 
vast alluvial plain of Bengal yields an increase 
unknown elsewhere. Over India generally, two 
harvests are had yearly from the same soil and 
sometimes three. The opening of the Suez Canal 
and the internal railways have made such a demand 
for India wheat, as sent the export up from 500 
tons in 1870 to 236,633 tons in 1877. The beau- 
tiful gossamers, the fairy-like muslins and the soft 
calicoes of India are from her home-grown cotton, 
the power to produce which is apparent, from the 



INDIA. 5 

increase of the India productions during our war, 
from thirty millions of dollars to over one hundred 
and seventy-five millions of dollars in value. The 
value of India's exports from 1836 to 1840 was 
over 46 millions of dollars, but from 1871 to 1875 
it was a fraction less than three hundred millions 
of dollars. In the fifteen years from i860 to 1875 
her exports were in excess of her imports by over 
fifty millions of dollars annually. The home 
coasting trade is estimated at $100,000 per annum, 
and employs 1,500 vessels and native craft. 

The teak tree is almost as hard and enduring for 
timber as oak, and can be as highly polished as 
mahogany. The coal mines at Raneegunj employ 
5000 persons and yield 600,000 tons annually. The 
opium monopoly of the British Government yields 
to the India exchequer thirty millions of dollars 
annually. 

Few things will indicate India's immense product- 
iveness more than the burden of taxes which she has 
endured for centuries. Under native princes often 
two thirds, rarely' if ever less than one-half, of the 



O INDIA. 

products of the soil were demanded by the Gov- 
ernment, and under British rule not less than one- 
third. Yet this vast and most densely packed 
population of the globe finds subsistence on what 
remains as their portion. 

Domestic animals are abundant and cheap. 
Wild animals are of almost every species. Nine- 
teen tigers and twenty one elephants were captured 
in one season near the author's camp. White ants 
destroy sun-dried brick, carpets, clothing and all 
but a few sorts of wood. Scorpions find their way 
into shoes and on to breakfast tables, and the 
cobra, whose bite is fatal, coils himself on ottomans 
and in bed rooms, and destroys hundreds of lives 
annually. 

POPULATION AND GOVERNMENT. 

The Imperial Census of 1871 showed India 
to have a population of 240^ millions of people, 
estimated then to be increasing at the rate 
of a half-percent, per annum. The census 



DIAGRAM OF COMPARATIVE POPU- 
lATIONS. 



TURKEY PROPER. 



GREAT BRITAIN. 



FRANCE. 



GERMANY. 



UNITED STATES. 



RUSSIA. 



The population of India is equal to that of all of the countries 
named in this diagram. 



INDIA. 7 

just now completed (1882) computes the popula- 
tion at two hundred and sixty three millions. It 
has thus thrice the population of the two Ameri- 
cas, twice that of the Roman Empire at its zenith, 
over five times that of the United States, eight 
times as many as France, and more than that of 
all the great continent of Africa combined with 
that of Oceanica. Portions of the country are 
densely crowded. Belgium is noted for its packed 
population, but the rural districts of Bengal, 
Bombay and Madras, are relatively more densely 
populated than Belgium, having from four hundred 
to eight hundred, and even in some cases a thous- 
and persons, to the square mile. 

Three-fifths of its area are under direct British rule, 
the remaining native States owning varying degrees 
of vassalage to Great Britain. The French and Por- 
tuguese retain sovereignty of limited territories. 

The 460 Native States, cover 600,000 square 
miles of territory, and have a population, roughly 
speaking, numerically equal to that of the United 
States to-day (1883). Hyderabad, the largest of 



8 INDIA. 

these States, contains 98,000 square miles and 
probably a population of ten millions. 

The Rajpootana States, the oldest and most 
renowned, are ruled by chieftains who can trace 
their ancestry to a point farther back than any 
other royal house in the world, and the members 
of whose family have had an unbroken reign over 
these lands from a time which antedates the his- 
tory of the British Isles. 

Village Republics.-r-Social order, however, 
has not depended on the great rulers — Hindoo, 
Mongol or British — so much as on the self-gov- 
ernment of the small communities. Every village 
in India is a little Republic, officered and adminis- 
tered internally by the local community. Justice is 
sought through a simple Board of Arbitrators 
readily extemporised by the selection of five per- 
sons to constitute it, who, ignoring all mere 
technicalities of law, are expected to act as a 
Court of Equity. From their decisions there is no ' 
appeal. These village Republics have given 
stability to Indian society. 



INDIA, 9 

ETHNOLOGY. 

India is an ethnological museum. The high 
plains of Iran are the ethnological watershed of 
the human race. The migrations of mankind have 
been from that as a recognized center. One large 
division of the human family who have migrated 
thence is known as the Turanian races. 

Turanians. — Over Europe, over America, and 
over large portions of Asia are to be found Turanian 
peoples. The cow-keeping Finns and Lapps of 
Northern Europe, the Magyarsof Central Germany, 
the people on the western water-shed of the Ural 
Mountains are of this type. Of this type too were the 
earliest settlers in India. In stock and language 
these Turanian aborigines remain to this day. They 
are on the hills, in the forests, in low malarious 
regions, or hanging on the outer edges of other 
groups of peoples. Loving debauch with intoxi- 
cating drinks ; burying not burning their dead ; 
speaking languages wholly dissimilar from those 
of the later invaders of the country ; constituting 
their courts of justice not of peers but of pa- 



lO INDIA. 

triarchs ; venerating no Brahman ; having religious 
rites and ethical codes peculiar to themselves ; 
offering in some tribes, human beings in sacrifice, 
except when restrained by the British Govern- 
ment ; without caste ; remarrying their widows, 
eating every kind of flesh, horse flesh or human 
flesh, and that without regard to disease having 
superinduced death, the later invaders called 
them "Raw eaters ; " without recoil at the sight of 
blood ; and having besides these, other character- 
istics, these aboriginal Turanian races are well nigh 
as distinct and identical, as though they had occu- 
pied through all the centuries of their existence, a 
quarter of the globe the remotest possible from 
the abode of the other inhabitants of India. 

The earliest of these aborigines are the Bheels. 
The Kols survive in the Santhal and other tribes 
in the fastnesses of Central India, or, more culti- 
vated and modified by their contact with Brahman- 
ism, in the Tamils and Teloogoos ; or, yet in 
smaller divisions, as Gonds Todas, Khonds, Parsees 
Bhootiyas Tualavas, Malabars, the Karens of 



INPIA. II 

Burmah, and others in every extremity of the 
land. 

The latest of these aboriginal Turanian race- 
waves was the Tamil. Turanian, however, also, — 
in the other branch of its stock the Mongols — was 
the yet later wave of the Tartar Kings, un- 
der whom was built the most splendid and 
imposing architecture ever wrought by man. 
The palaces and the Pearl Mosque at Agra ; 
the Peacock Throne, the Jama Masjid, and 
the mirror-lined baths of Delhi ; the Windsor 
Castle of Akbar at Futtehpore Sikri, and his tomb 
at Secundra ; and — that other crown of all human 
achievement — The Taj 2X Agra. 

Aryans. — The early home of the Turanian 
was the early home of the Aryan. The cultured 
Greek, the law-making and organizing Roman, 
the blonde Norwegian, the dark-eyed Spaniard, 
the mercurial Frenchman, the plodding and per- 
severing German, the hardy-purposed and ener- 
getic Anglo-Saxon, the enterprising and practical 
Anglo-American, represent the Aryan in the west. 



12 INDIA. 

The fire-worshipping Parsee, and the Brahmanic 
Hindoo of the Gangetic valley, represent this 
same blood-current in the Orient. 

The Hindoo — the Indian Aryan be it borne 
in mind — belongs to the race that founded a 
Persian dynasty ; that built Athens, Lacedae- 
mon, and the "City of the Seven Hills;" that 
fought at Thermopylae, and that excavated silver 
ore in pre-historic Spain. 

This Indian Aryan had a civilization that was 
old, when our branch of this race-family fished in 
willow canoes about the white cliffs of Albion and 
before they worked the mines of Cornwall. His 
forefathers wore silks when ours wore red paint. 
His Vedic hymns were probably sung before David 
penned his Psalms, while his rock hewn temples of 
Elephanta and Ellora are of finer finish than the 
temples of Karnac and Luxor. 

His speech has formed the language-base of half 
of Asia and of nearly all of Europe. He so far 
exhausted the science of phonetics that we have 
made no considerable progress therein but by 



INDIA. 13 

studying and applying what he has taught. His 
logic and grammar ; his philosophy materialistic 
and spiritual, have not only been exported to the 
west, but have moulded the thought of the world 
more than, as yet, all the world besides has 
moulded his. He taught medicine to the Arab who 
in turn taught it to Europe. Not only do tombs 
and palaces display his culture, but his social and 
political systems merit and are receiving the pro- 
foundest attention of western minds. We have 
the decimal system, algebra and differential and 
infinitessimal calculi from him. From him, too, 
come geometry and trigonometry ; from him, 
applied mathematics, in hydrostatics and astron- 
omy. He fixed the calendar, invented the zodiac 
and calculated eclipses and the precession of the 
equinoxes. 

In India the family subdivides into Bengali Hin- 
di, Mahratti, Gujurati, Orissa and Punjaubi. These 
forced back the aborigines, their predecessors the 
Turanians, to the line of the Vindhya Mountains, 
from the Indus on the west to the Brahmaputra 



14 INDIA. 

on the east. On the Western Ghats and on the 
Neastern coast, but mainly to the south of the 
Vindhya and in the center of the continent they have 
made no inroads, though through all the land they 
have more or less affected these aborigines, in 
their language, their customs and their creed, 
wherever they have come in contact with them. 
Into India this Hindoo Aryan came then, a 
conquering stock. 

Semitic Peoples. — From the home and the 
cradle in Iran went a third group of peoples, the 
authors of as grand ideas, and of as permanent 
results as those of any oi their contemporaries 
or competitors. This group of races origin- 
ated commerce and the alphabet, and brought 
to the world its profoundest sense of the 
personality of the deity. The early Phoeni- 
cian, the tent-loving Arab, the Hebrew with 
his types and his oracles, are constituents 
of this group of Semitic peoples. In India 
forty-two millions of Moslems represent this Eth- 
nic group, and the culture of which it has been 



INDIA. 15 

found capable — a culture which made Bagdad and 
Damascus cities of light, which gave millions 01 
dollars to endow universities ; which crowded the 
shelves of Cordova with 400,000 volumes ; and 
those of Cairo with 100.000 manuscripts used as a 
a circulating library, and which gave to Granada 
its most fascinating and poetic architecture. The 
vast chambers of the Escorial to day afford a 
monumental museum of this people, who there 
read " treatises on geography, medicine, chemistry, 
jurisprudence, mathematics, grammar, logic, phil- 
osophy and numismatics, who discovered the 
velocity of light and its reflection and refraction, 
who prepared acids and oxides, found the use of 
the pendulum, and measured a degree of the 
earth's surface at the equator. " 

This Indian Moslem is a great factor in India. 
Queen Victoria counts among her Indian subjects 
more followers of Mahomet than are governed by 
any Moslem ruler in the world. 



l6 INDIA. 

LANGUAGE. 

India, as we have seen, has not a homogeneous 
population. Her nations are polyglot. The 
variety in their speech is surprising. Omitting 
English, the language of the government, the 
courts and the universities ; omitting Sanskrit, the 
sacred but unspoken language of the Brahmans 
and Indo-Aryans ; omitting Persian, the literary 
language of the Moslems; omitting the languages 
spoken east of Bengal in Burmah ; omitting 
Beloochi and other languages spoken beyond the 
northwest frontier, the number of cultivated 
languages spoken in India cannot fall short of a 
hundred and twenty, while more than sixty un- 
cultivated languages are spoken in Nepal, Bhootan 
Assam and Burmah. 

Group 1. — Beyond the Indus, the ancient bound- 
ary, two millions speak Afghan or Pashtu, which is 
midway between Persian and Indian Vernaculars. 
Farther east, along the Himalayas, 1 5^ millions 
speak Cashmeri ; yet farther east the Thibetan be- 
gins ; beyond this 2 millions speak Nepalese, while 



INDIA. 17 

adjoining this, eastward, Lepcha, a language 
of Thibet, is spoken. Assamese a dialect of Ben- 
gali is spoken by 1% niillions, and other lan- 
guages are spoken by rude tribes of the northeast- 
ern frontier. 

In the Bombay Presidency these Aryan Lan- 
guages are also spoken — Sindhi by 2 millions, 
Gujarati by about 7 millions, Marathi and Kon- 
kani by about 15 millions. These in turn have 
ramified into dialects. More than twelve dialects 
of Hindi alone are spoken. 

Group 2. — The next great family of Languages 
is Dravidian. These have borrowed from the Sans- 
krit as English has from Latin, most of the words 
for higher class of ideas, but they are otherwise 
wholly independent of Sanskrit, and are older 
than the oldest Aryan, older than the separation 
between Aryan and Turanian. These Dravidian 
languages are spoken in every part of the Presi- 
dency of Madras, in the South part of the Bengal 
Presidency, in the Central Provinces and other parts. 
The group comprises 12 languages besides local di- 



1 8 INDIA. 

alects, and half of these are cultivated tongues. Or- 
aon in Chota Nagpore, Rajmahal on the Raj Mahal 
hills, and that of the Santhals, the language of the 
Khonds in the hilly region behind Orissa, and the 
Gonds of the Central Provinces numbering over 
I y2 millions. The Tuda and Kota are spoken in the 
Neilgherry hills. On the hills and jungly tracts 
between upper and lower Bengal and on the pla- 
teau of Chota Nagpore, seven languages of the 
Kolarian family are spoken by three millions 
of people, prominent among whom are the 
Santhals. 

Group 3. — The Indo-Aryan Vernaculars are 
related to Sanskrit as Italian and Spanish are to 
Latin, being formed from the decomposition of 
Sanskrit. Besides Cashmeri, Nepalese, and As- 
samese already mentioned, there are seven others 
which are not dialects but distinct languages 
spoken on the plains of India alone. Bengali is 
spoken in Lower Bengal by 36 millions, Oriya in 
Orissa by 5 millions, while Hindi more widely 
spoken than any other Indian language abounds 



INDIA. 19 

in dialects. Hindustani is a compound language 
of Persian and Hindi ; so is Marwari, the lan- 
guage of the most extensive of the Rajput States. 
Hindi is spoken in Upper Bengal and the south- 
western Provinces, and throughout Rajpootana by 
more than 100 millions; Panjabi by about 12 
millions. These all belong to the Presidency of 
Bengal. On the southern part of the Coromandel 
Coast and in Northern Ceylon, the cultivated 
Tamil comes with its extensive literature, spoken 
by 14^ millions, then Telugu, the Italian of the 
East in the North Coromandel Coast, and in the 
Nizam's territory by 155^ millions. Then the 
language of Mysore, the Canarese, spoken by 95^ 
millions. Next comes the language of the south- 
ern portion of the Malabar Coast, the Malayalim, 
spoken by 3^^ millions, the ancient Tamil, 
the Too-loo (Tulu) in the District of Canara 
spoken by about 300,000, and the Coorg on the 
hills west of Mysore, thus making 45,600,000 
speaking these Dravidian languages. 

Burmese, allied with Thibetan on the north, is 



20 INDIA. 

spoken by about eleven millions of people. This 
language is monosyllabic. 

INDIA'S PIA CE IN HISTOR V. 

1. India is the Prize of the East.— -For 

ages western commerce and western culture have 
been knit with India. The Egyptians at an early 
period carried arms to the Ganges, and fitted out 
a fleet of four hundred ships in the Arabian Gulf, 
to establish trade with India. The Phoenicians 
wrested from the Egyptians their harbor at the 
entrance of the Red Sea and turned this trade 
overland by way of Tyre, forming the shortest 
route known in point of time until the passage 
round the Cape of Good Hope was discovered. 

The Persians explored the Indus throughout its 
entire length all the way to the ocean to secure 
this India trade. The Turks founded Alexandria 
to rival Tyre and it became the greatest trading 
city of the world and for eighteen centuries the 
chief seat of commerce with India. To divert 
this commerce from Tyre, Alexander proceeded 



INDIA. 21 

to India and sent a fleet thence to the Persian 
Gulf and the Euphrates. 

Later, the Egyptian Berenice, on the west coast 
of the Red Sea, was built as an entrepot for this 
India traffic ; thence it was carried by land 250 
miles to Coptos, and thence by three miles of 
canal to the Nile, and for two hundred and fifty 
years while the Egyptians were independent this 
was the route of the India wealth. When the 
Romans conquered Egypt the Alexandria trade 
was increased. They also conducted this traffic 
up the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates, thence 85 
miles to Palmyra or Tadmor in the wilderness, 
thence 117 miles to the Mediterranean sea. 

As from this India commerce ensued Egyptian 
Opulence, so when Rome controlled it, her streets 
were filled with aromatic spices, cloth, linen, coral, 
silver and jewels brought from Hindustan. 

During two centuries the Mohammedan and 
Christian powers of Europe were engaged in 
war which interrupted the commerce of the old 
routes ; but war could not check it long, for 



22 INDIA. 

it soon swept round camp and battle field, by an 
eighty day caravan route to the banks of the 
Oxus and down to the Caspian, thence across that 
sea to the river Cyrus, thence overland to the 
Phosis and down it to the Euxine or Black Sea 
and onward to Constantinople. Constantinople 
became the mart for Indian and Chinese goods. 
The cities of the Mediterranean opened commu 
nication with this far East, and the Moslem power 
was re-established from Constantinople to Al- 
exandria, and the Saracen grew rich and pow- 
erful through the control of this commerce with 
India. 

It is marvelous to recall the creations of this 
trade. Though now 

"Palmyra's loae columns sublimely declare, 
The last of its people sleep motionless there," 

yet for centuries she was independent, fascinating 
and luxuriously rich, because she was the cara- 
vansary of this trade with Hindoostan. Bussora 
started out of the sea as by the spell of enchant- 
ment when this commerce consented to halt in 



INDIA. 23 

that locality. Florence, whose houses were 
palaces and who has given to the world more 
famous men than any place in Italy besides ; 
Genoa, with its oldest bank of circulation in 
Europe ; Venice, the nymph of the sunlit sea 
with its islands united by the bridal bands of four 
hundred and sixty-five bridges ; with its master- 
pieces of art; for centuries the foremost capital of 
commerce in the west; sustaining an independent 
existence through thirteen centuries — these all, 
Florence, Genoa and Venice — became the bankers 
and shippers of Europe and grew to prominence 
and to power, because they seized and distributed 
the wealth and the wonders of the Indies of the 
east. 

Constantinople, too, and the " Golden Horn " 
flashed in splendor and in pride, because of this 
commerce with the land of the dark skinned 
Hindoo ; and this trade was about to make the 
Saracen master of all Europe, when the dis- 
covery of the passage round the Cape of Good 
Hope at an opportune hour, transferred the golden 



24 INDIA. 

gains of this oriental commerce from the coffers 
of the Mohammedan to those of Protestant 
Christendom in the North Atlantic, and left the 
Mediterranean but an inland lake. 

The contest that raged of old, is renewed in 
our day, and England's ships and England's arms 
contend for supremacy in Egypt only to insure the 
communication with India, that her cotton and her 
pearls may be had in exchange for the textures of 
Lancashire looms and the cutlery of Birmingham. 
Divest England of India and she sinks as in the 
sea. 

2, India is the Key to Asia. — Buddhism 

spread from two points in India — from the north 
and the south. In the north the route of its 
diffusion was Nepal, Tibet, Western China, Mon- 
golia and Japan. The Buddhism of the south 
spread over Pegri, Burmah, Siam and Kambojia. 
The vehicle was Sanskrit in the north and Pali in 
the south. 

Mr. Latham in his Ethnology has well said : 
" With the creed went the alphabet, and with the 



INDIA. 25 

•' alphabet the civilization. Hence it is to India 
" that nine-tenths of the civilization of the eastern 
" part of continental Asia is due." 

*' Indian also," he says, " is the earliest civiliza- 
" tion of the more civilized parts of the Indian 
" Archipelago." The inhabitants of the island of 
Batti, the Battas of Sumatra, the Phillipine Is- 
landers, the rude tribes of the interior of the 
Maylayan Peninsula, the Dyaks of Borneo, Mr. 
Latham says, always exhibit Indian elements. 

What we have above remarked is not all, 
of the past. The tides of literary influence set 
from India over northwestern and northern Asia. 
A few years since Persian was the court language 
of India. Poets and orators, who became emi- 
nent in Persia, were wont to traverse India 
entertaining large audiences with their literary 
productions. Various influences have combined 
with the change of the court language from Persian 
to English in India to reverse this whole intel- 
lectual tide. To-day it sets in the opposite direc- 
tion. Books and papers printed in Calcutta, 



26 INDIA. 

speeches made at Delhi, Lucknow and Bombay, 
are read and pondered at Ispahan. The current 
is freighted with influences which are distributed 
over all the plains of Iran. 

The Himalayas are forming a literary pass, for 
Euporean thought to Ladak. And the Irrawaddy 
bears western thought and influence through the 
Shan states and opens another gateway to western 
China. 

Fifty thousand of India's people have found a 
home — a new India — in British Guiana on the new 
continent. Her people are in the Mauritius, and 
if once the iron bands of caste relax enough to 
set them at liberty to emigrate, they may overrun 
Africa. 

India has had a Wonderful Internal His- 
tory. — Her ancient history can scarcely be re- 
counted beyond a thousand years, yet within this 
time Buddhist, Brahman, Mongul and Turk, Por- 
tugese, French and English have controlled her 
domain. The early Mohammedan dynasties reach 
chronologically from A. D. looi to 1857. The 



INDIA. 27 

houses of Ghazni and Ghor ; the Slave-Kings 
chiefly Turki ; the houses of Khilji and Tughlak ; 
the Sayyids and (Afghan) Lodis, and the Moghul 
house of Timur, with its brilliant and powerful 
monarchs Babar, Akbar the Great, Jahangir, Shah- 
jahan and Aurangzebe ; and others, dazzling the 
gaze of the historian and the antiquarian, furnish 
altogether through eight centuries and a half some 
of the most startling surprises, and profoundly in- 
teresting and important denouements of political 
Empire on the Tigris and the Ganges and from 
the Indian ocean to the central plains of Tartary. 
In 1497 the Portugese touched India and re- 
mained in prominence and in power till the i6th 
century. The Dutch appeared in 1594, the Eng- 
lish in 1600, the Danes in 1616, and the French in 
1688. France led the contest for supremacy with 
England for a hundred years. In the wondrously 
interesting century between the battle of Plassey 
(1757) and the great mutiny (1857) the vast 
Indian Empire of England was acquired, — 
built up from a factory to a Governor- Generalship, 



28 INDIA. 

a Vice- Royalty, and ultimally to the recognition 
of Victoria as Princess of India. 

SOCIAL ORDER. 

Indian Society is peculiar. Partly from religious 
causes, partly from successive ethnic waves of im- 
migration and partly from an economic division of 
labor, there exist great class-divisions of society. 
The social league rests on caste, with its roots 
deep down in the race-elements of the people — the 
**twice-born" Aryan and the '*once-born" non- 
Aryan ; the sacred-threaded, Veda-readers, and 
those to whom the thread and the book are denied. 

Caste is "a social element but not a social dis- 
"tinction ; it has a religious element, but it is hard- 
ily a religious institution ; it finds its sanction in a 
"religious idea, inasmuch as Brahma is said to 
"have been its author, but it lives on irrespective 
"of religious faith or observance." 

In its economic and strictly social side its basal 
argument runs thus : 

I. An irreligious society is an impossible 



INDIA. 29 

society; without a foundation of morals men 
cannot organize. Hence the Hindoo sets apart 
a class, whose sole business it shall be, to 
evolve the tenets of morality, investigate the 
problems of theology and guard and guide the 
public thought on its religious side. He gets his 
first caste — Brahmans. 

2. But organized society must be systematic- 
ally guided and governed in other respects. 
There must be judges, and magistrates and 
governors for times of peace and captains and 
generals for times of war. He gets another 
caste — Kshatriyas. 

3. All must subsist, however, on the products 
of the soil. Another class shall till it and trade 
in the products thereof These are Vaishyas. 

4. Artisans and ordinary laborers are as essen- 
tial as others. He groups them together as a 
fourth class — Sudras. 

Such are the general ligaments of his social 
structure. Beyond these are the outcasts or 
Pariah races, with non-Aryan blood-currents in 



30 INDIA. 

their veins. They are barnacles on society. 
Religiously, the four castes are of divine but 
divergent origin, and the Hindoo civil law, 
which is nothing if it is not religious, recognizes 
communal property in a group of related fami- 
lies, and conditions inheritance under the law on 
observance of caste purity and order. A Hindoo's 
claim to a portion in the family inheritance is 
lost by his deflection from caste regulations. 

The Hindoo believes in ancestor worship, and 
holds that the peace of his forefathers is depend- 
ent on his performance of the rites for the dead. 
But if he violate caste regulations he is excluded 
from the ceremony, and his ancestors thrust from 
the bliss of heaven. He therefore puts in jeopardy 
the peace of his entire line of progenitors by his 
violation of these social regulations. It is on the 
religious side, that we must find that which 
accounts for the almost entire absence of any de- 
sire or attempt to pass from one caste to another. 
Theoretically, they are different orders of beings. 
The thing is impossible and absurd ; a donkey 



INDIA. 31 

might as soon expect to become a butterfly, or a 
frog to be transformed into a humming-bird. 
The low-caste man has no ambition to become a 
Brahman, or to rise within the social order, 
because an impassable gulf of origin and species 
is supposed to separate them. It is logically 
necessary for the preservation of caste purity that 
the blood-currents be kept apart, hence inter- 
marriage beyond caste lines is prohibited, and 
does not occur. Infant marriages contributing, if 
not being essential, to the preservation of this 
order, are strictly observed, children of two years 
of age being betrothed in marriage, within caste 
lines. 

Logically, therefore, and necessarily caste dis- 
tinctions are hereditary ; and as the subdivisions 
of the greater classes follow economic lines, we 
get not only hereditary priests and rulers, but 
hereditary rope-dancers, water-carriers and sweep- 
ers ; hereditary elephant drivers, and turban- 
winders ; hereditary ear-cleaners, ear-piercers, and 
idol makers. Here are leaf-plate makers, cow- 



32 INDIA. 

dung sellers and charmers, pedigree-makers and 
painters of horses tails, all hereditary ; alms- 
takers hereditary, and common blackguards her- 
editary. A man is born to a destiny. 

The employments of the people and the locali- 
ties in which they live, have thus caused the greater 
castes to be subdivided, by all the developments 
incident to a minute and highly artificial distribu- 
tion of labor. Hence there are nearly as many 
castes as there are sorts of craftsmen, the 
subdivisions extending through all the orders. 
Even the Brahmans recognize ten quite distinct 
classes among themselves, eight of the ten feeling 
themselves quite apart from the remaining two, 
and the total Brahmanical subdivisions, now 
recognized, numbering 1866. The Rajputs or 
Warrior castes number 590. Altogether these 
divisions ramify so widely and so minutely, that 
there are not less than three thousand separate 
classes with separate names, in various parts of 
India. 

So powerful has this tendency to the observance 



INDIA. 33 

of class distinctions been, that the Outcasts or 
Pariahs have come to recognize orders among 
themselves, and Mohammedans have submitted 
to the same influence and are separated into four 
castes in India. Even the Jains and Seikhs have 
not escaped the spell. 

Many of the caste usages are purely arbitrary. 
Earthen vessels used once for cooking food or 
water cannot be removed to another place, but 
may be repeatedly used at the same spot. Smok- 
ing from the bowl of another's pipe, will not defile 
it, if one can acquire the dexterity necessary to 
make a stem of his fist, but, however costly, if the 
snake or stem of the pipe be touched, it becomes 
worthless. Loads may be carried on the head by 
some castes, on the back and shoulders by others, 
but no amount of bribery or abuse will secure an 
inversion of the order. 

The poorest Hindoo family do not wash their 
own clothes, but the loin-cloth must always be 
washed by the wearer. Mutual contact is not 
only eschewed but if a high caste man were 



^34 INDIA. 

touched by a person of low caste, while eating, 
he would throw away his meal and spit out what 
food he might chance to have in his mouth. 

There are compensations to Hindoo society for 
the inconvenience, cruelty and wrong which caste 
rules and prejudice superinduce. Caste is a 
means of holding society together and of some 
kind of moral restraint. The India policy checks 
genius, but from the first the individual wastes no 
time in selecting his occupation, and hereditary 
aptitudes become apparent so that unmatched skill 
is had in handiwork, silver-work, paintings, shawls, 
and all work of the needle and of the loom. 

The India system gives permanence to institu- 
tions, though it superinduces a conservatism 
which hinders the spread of western influences 
and the free play of individual energies. 

It is difficult for an individual, therefore, to be 
an innovator ; there is, there must be, community 
of thought and action, or none at all ; the indi- 
vidual is not as in Europe a pebble in a pudding- 
stone, he is a drop in the ocean. There is an 



INDIA. 35 

intellectual communism. The mind moves only in 
mass, and this massing of mind has so long existed 
that the individual is not only content that it 
shall be so, but has no possible conception of a 
different state of things. Caste not only incon- 
veniences the individual, but it has incapacitated 
him ; not alone his wilfulness but his weakness 
lies in your way; there is left no individuality to 
which to attach motive forces. 

It is little wonder that Christian missionaries 
have come to consider caste as the greatest diffi- 
culty in the way of individual conversion. The 
Hindu must, at a time when he has not tasted any 
of the esoteric sweets of the Christian life, elect 
not only a strange and untried religion, but his 
convictions must carry him to the point of elect- 
ing along with it, exile from everything he has 
been taught to hold dear, with chances of 
vagrancy to boot. He must gather a strength of 
conviction which we are wont to attribute only to 
mature Christianity at the very threshold of his 
inquiry. He must endure martyrdom, not with 



36 INDIA. 

Stephen's vision and as a model Christian, but at 
the first flush of his convictions, and even while 
he yet thinks "custom" to be the aggregated wis- 
dom of the ages, against which it may prove the 
veriest folly to launch, either his individual argu- 
ments or example, and differing from which, he is 
ready in advance to distrust his own conclusions. 

We are not the apologist of Indian caste. It 
has brought about or constitutes a social order 
the most complicated the world has yet seen, and 
yet which is but the woof, woven with every 
variety of pattern on the pervading warp of a 
monstrous mythology, energized, dignified, and 
perpetuated by highly ingenious, but well nigh as 
monstrous, philosophical principles. 

Social Change. — This old order is however 
being seriously disturbed by contact with western 
society and civilization. That any society should 
by compulsion intermingle with another wholly 
dissimilar and not be modified thereby, would 
seem impossible, but when the contact superin- 
duces a clash of two dissimilar civilizations, and 



INDIA. 37 

the victorious is a foreign one, which, in the char- 
acter of a victor, seeks to attach itself to the very 
soil and society it has conquered, it may naturally 
be supposed that it will drive its ploughshare 
through the old social organism to a great degree. 
This is just what the mutiny did in India. 
It brought Western Christian civilization into 
close and moulding contact with Indian society. 
We need but recount the items. The taking of 
the country under the direct government of the 
crown — the opening of it to more enlarged indi- 
vidual competition — the influx of Europeans and 
European capital — the attempt of the government 
to attach these to the soil by gratuitous and other 
distributions of confiscated and waste lands — the 
great physical improvement of the country in in- 
ternal lines of communication by canals, and five 
great trunk railroads and telegraphs — the effort 
of the crown to secure the retirement of all old 
Indian officials by increasing their pension if they 
retired within a limited period, and leaving the 
vacancies thus created open to a competition of 



38 INDIA. 

mere merit, that thus the fresh and vigorous 
young mind of the West might come to preside 
over the increased influx of accidental influences, 
and to attach itself to the Indian social organism 
at a time when its whole crusts were upturned by- 
recent convulsion— in the non-regulation prov- 
inces, from the beginning, and in all to a degree, 
the fusing down of all Mohammedan, Hindu, and 
Christian law, into one great common code suit- 
able for Christian rule — the introduction and ad- 
justment to Eastern education of such schemes as 
had been found to give an impetus to education in 
the West, such as the duplication by government 
of all moneys raised by private parties for public 
schools — are some of the forms in which 
Western civilization has touched India since 1857. 
The modification produced by this contact is 
not necessarily the christianization of the people. 
Yet Hinduism, albeit that it has an alluring phi- 
losophy, with a crazy chronology, and a pan- 
theon of all ridiculous deities, holding her great 
mob by the weird spell of a stupendous supersti- 



INDIA. 39 

tion, cannot brook contact with Western civiliza- 
tion, even without a missionary and without a 
Bible, and not undergo material modification. 

The remodeling is already in some form setting 
in. And he who has seen the young and waking 
intellect of India, loosened from its old fastenings, 
grasping convulsively European rationalism and 
suddenly coming to the recollection of its antece- 
dents, trying to graft this on to the old stock of 
Hinduism, he who has seen it blind and strong, 
clutching columns which support consequences 
disastrous to itself, endeavoring to topple these 
about its own ears — he who has seen all this and 
much more — though he may count it a mere re- 
bound of a mind suddenly loosed from supersti- 
tion, yet cannot but surmise, whether the result 
of the contact of Western civilization is to be a 
Christian regeneration or a Hindu transmigration. 
But as there can be little doubt that in a sense and 
to a degree never witnessed before, there is the 
grafting, now, of a young and lively Western 
civilization on an old and worn Eastern one, so 



40 INDIA. 

there can be no doubt that there are setting in 
among this people tidal forces of mind and manners 
and morals^ which will carry India s future with 
their flow. 

Progress. — India is having a marvelous 
development. Within thirty years, she has 
built and now operates in her borders ten thousand 
miles of railroad, and has lOOO miles more being 
constructed (1883). Eighteen hundred miles of 
telegraph line in the country put it little behind 
Europe in this respect. Three cable lines connect it 
with England, Australia and China. It is only half- 
a-month by mail from England, and letters have 
reached New York from Bombay in twenty four 
days. It has a reliable and cheap postal 
system ramifying to every hamlet in the land. 
Fifty colleges of science, law, medicine and art 
are aiding to quicken and guide thought. Over a 
million and a quarter of students are in schools 
aided by governmenj:. Over three thousand ver- 
nacular publications have been known to be issued 
in a single year. Eighty-five colleges of science, 



INDIA. 41 

law, medicine and art are instilling knowledge 
into the minds of about 9,000 students. 49,000 
candidates applied for admission at these universi- 
ties within the past ten years, of whom 18,500 
matriculated and 1,610 passed to A. B. and 305 
to A. M. There are 66,500 educational institu- 
tions of all sorts in the land, with nearly two 
millions of students. A new literature is being 
created for fifty-three millions of children. 

There lies before the writer a list of one hun- 
dred and one vernacular newspapers and periodi- 
cals received at the office of the Government 
Reporter on the Vernacular Press of Upper India, 
Feb., 1882. 

RELIGIONS. 

Aboriginal Superstitions. — As India fur- 
nishes a museum of races, so she does also of 
religions. The most primitive races of the human 
family are represented to-day in the three non- 
Aryan stocks found in the Tibeto-Burman tribes 
of the Himalayas and Burmah, the Kolarians on 



42 INDIA. 

the northeastern ranges of the tableland of Cen- 
tral India, and the Dravidians of the southernmost 
part of the land. 

In certain localities of the Central Provinces 
they amount to half the population. Many of 
these tribes remain as described by the Vedic 
poets of 3,000 years ago. They have no knowl- 
edge of friendly gods ; the supernatural is always 
malicious. The earth swarms with demons, with 
river-spirits, forest-spirits, well-demons, and moun- 
tain-demons that must be kept in good humor, 
and whose ill-will must be averted by the sacrifice 
of goats, chickens or human beings. The sacri- 
ficial ceremony must be varied to adapt it to 
marriages and deaths, or to avert small pox, 
dearth or famine. Some gods must be worshipped 
with a white fowl and a pig, others with rice, milk, 
butter, betelnut, pigeons or goats. They have 
race-gods, tribe-gods, and family gods. The great 
divinity of the Khonds is the earth-god, who 
demands a human victim twice a year, kidnapped, 
and bought with a price. In Tinnevelly, if an 



INDIA. 43 

infant cries all night a devil is in it. Bullocks 
take fright, an ill built house falls down and each 
bodily ailment occurs, because of the presence of 
a devil. A rat-bite superinduces a fever so violent 
that the native doctor tells of five devils who resist 
his skill. Thirteen devils have been known to be 
worshipped in a village of nine houses. 

Vedic Forms of Faith. — Theoretically the 
Hindu religion starts from the Veda ; practically it 
is from various and divergent sources. 

The Aryan came from his home in Iran, with 
sacred stories and myths, and with deities, adored 
to this day by names which migrated with the 
other branch of his family into Greece and Rome, 
and which are preserved even now by the Protest- 
ant clergy of England, and the Romanist priests 
in Peru, as well as by the Brahmans of Banares 
and Calcutta. His Vedic hymns are preserved as 
they were written, nearly five thousand years ago. 
His singers adored the '* Father-Heaven," the 
" Encompassing Sky," the " High-born Dawn," 
with its " Fleet out-riders," the first rays of the 



44 INDIA. 

sunrise, the *' Storm gods," the " Wind," and the 
intoxicating fermented juice of his sacrificial plant 
the "Soma" — thirty-three gods in all — eleven on 
earth, eleven in heaven and eleven dwelling in 
mid-air, received his adoration. 

His great Hymnal, the Rig Veda, an old collec- 
tion of 1017 poems, is believed to have existed 
"from before all time." Three other service books 
were added later, making Four Vedas. The 
oldest singers gave him the Rig Veda ; the next 
was his sacrificial ceremonial — The Soma Veda; 
the third, projecting this service partly in prose 
became the Yajur Veda; the fourth, compiled 
from the least ancient hymns, is the Atharva 
Veda. The prose works attched to each, explain 
the duties of priests and are named Brahmanas. 
These supplied his divinely inspired theology, as 
the others did his divinely inspired psalms. The 
Sutras or "strings of pithy sentences" regarding 
law and ceremonies, the Upanishads treating of 
God and the soul, the Aranyakas or Tracts for the 
forest recluse, and the Puranas the traditions from 



INDIA. 45 

of old, " Things Remembered," were all added 
later to his sacred literature. 

The confused groups of Vedic deities, gave 
place in India, to the conception of one God in 
three persons, as Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the 
Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer or Reproducer. 
Vishnu, in ten incarnations has descended to earth, 
and with Siva, in many forms of both, compose 
the deities of the Hindus. 

The Brahmans built up a religion for the people 
of India, worked out into six schools of phil- 
osophy, five hundred years before Christ. The 
customs of the Brahmans are preserved in "House- 
hold Maxims," the " Code of Manu," and in other 
codes and commentaries, which set forth domestic 
and civil rights, the administration of justice, and 
religious purifications and penances, and accord- 
ingly regulate caste, marriage, inheritance and 
food. 

The Mahabarata is a great collection of 50,000 
lines of Indian legends. The Ramayana forms 
the epic history of the Solar race of Oudh, with 



46 INDIA. 

the wondrous birth and boyhood of Rama. 
Sacred dramas of yet later date are widely known. 
Through twenty-two centuries the Brahmans have 
been the writers and learned men of India, the 
counsellors of princes, and the priests and teachers 
of the people. 

Hindu Philosophy. — The vast intellectual 
activity of India has been most displayed in the 
departments of metaphysics, philosophy and 
religion. 

"If I were asked," says Max MuUer, "under 
what sky the human mind has most fully devel- 
oped some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply 
pondered on the problems of life, and has found 
solutions of some of them which well deserve the 
attention of even those who have studied Plato 
and Kant, I should point to India. " * * * * 
" India of a thousand or two thousand years ago, 
aye, the India of to-day is full of problems the 
solution of which concerns all of us even in this 
Europe of the nineteenth century." 

The six schools of philosophy all agree in cer- 



INDIA. 47 

tain outlines of thought. i. They all aim to 
inculcate expedients for absorption into the deity. 
,2. They all teach that evil is the opposite of such 
absorption. 3. That this is caused not by sin, 
but results from ignorance. 4. That this ignor- 
ance is simply deception. 5. That from this 
soul-ignorance proceeds desires, and from these 
desires spring actions which are good or bad. 
6. That from these moral actions results the 
necessity for transmigration that reward or pun- 
ishment may be received. 7. They all teach that 
the only way to avoid transmigration is to use 
certain means that lead to the recognition that the 
soul is distinct from the mind, the senses, the 
body, and all else ; hence penances, pilgrimages, 
the repetition of sacred words, and all the expedi- 
ents of the ascetic which tend to lessen desire. 

They all agree in their fundamental teaching 
about God. The basal thought of God in the 
Hindu sacred philosophy is common to Buddhism 
and Brahminism. The Hindu affects to have a 
concept of God as pure, simple, incomprehensible 



48 INDIA. . 

existence, without hope, because he can desire 
nothing, without fear, and without all qualities — 
only the / am. God may exist with or without 
shape. They all agree in denying the doctrine of 
creation out of nothing, yet they differ in their 
teaching of the origin of the appearance of the 
universe. The Nyaya school teach that God made 
the world out of uncreated eternal atoms. The 
Sankhya suppose "nature" to be eternal and the 
appearance of it to result from coming into juxta- 
position with God. When " nature " comes near 
God (or soul) the reflection of it on God (soul) 
makes the universe to appear, as by putting a rose 
alongside of a China vase, the rose appears in the 
vase. The Vedanta school teaches pure ideal 
pantheism. 

Creation out of nothing is to the Vedantist an 
absurdity. " The product of something is some- 
" thing, the product of nothing is nothing. Oil is 
" in sessamum before it is pressed, milk in the 
" udder before it is drawn, rice in the husk before 
" it is shelled. A thing possible is made from 



INDIA. 49 

" that which is competent to produce it. Cloth, 
*' not pottery, is made from yarn, milk, not water, 
" is taken to make curds, a potter does not weave 
" cloth but makes jars and vessels from his clay 
"and wheel. The product, is nothing more than 
" the cause itself, " 

Hence, '* The divinity is fire ; he is the sun ; he 
" is the brilliant stars ; he is water ; he is the lord 
" of all creatures ; he is man ; he is woman ; he is 
"the maiden ; he is youth; he is the bee with 
" dark plumage ; he is the green bug with ruby 
** eyes ; he is the cloud, the womb of the lightning, 
** the seasons, the sea. He is the universe and all 
" things produced in it. " 

As a spider spins his web from himself, as 
sparks fly from the heated iron, as hairs grow on 
the human body, thus the universe is only man- 
ifold shapes of God. The Hindu is unmoved by 
arguments based on western metaphysical notions. 
Appearances are deceptive. The man with the 
jaundice thinks all things to be yellow : we pursue 
the mirage in search of palaces and lakes, start 



50 INDIA. 

back from a crooked stick thinking it a snake, 
or pick up the pearl oyster mistaking it for silver. 
How far such deception goes we could never tell, 
but it has been revealed that all notions of 
individuality are an illusion. 

It is idle to plead the individuality of passions 
in evidence against him. Put a dozen water pots 
in the moonlight and it looks as if there were a 
dozen moons. Yet there is only one. Shake the 
water in one, and it looks as if the moonlight were 
disturbed, whereas the rays dart as directly 
through the water as when it was calm. Thus, 
hopes, fears, pain and the like, do not prove the 
individuality of soul, there being but one great 
soul. The ascetic seeks to get quit of this painful 
deception that he is something apart from God. 
Hence he sits in the jungle looking at the point 
of his nose for years, seeks to become dead to 
suffering by occupying postures of pain, by modes 
and inventions past description. Failing in this 
he must continue to take other shapes even after 
this life, and these must be according to the moral 



INDIA. 51 

qualities of his acts in this life. Whoever steals a 
priest's property shall become a crocodile, or fruit 
will become a monkey, or corn a mouse, or a deer 
must appear as a wolf He who defames the 
character of any one will in his next birth "have 
stinking breath." The highest ambition of a 
Hindu woman is that in her next reappearance 
she will become a man. 

The sin deplored is however mainly neglect 
of ceremonial observances or the destruction of 
life in some of its many forms. Hence the sacri- 
fices to atone for the destruction of insects in 
tilling the fields, or that may have been swallowed 
in drinking water or breathing. 

Pre-eminent amongst expedients for absolu- 
tion is bathing in the Ganges. To the Hindu 
the "milky way" is the heavenly Ganges, that 
wanders among the stars, and laves the foot 
of the throne of the deity itself. To obtain 
merit enough to get it down on the Earth 
Mahadev the third person in the great Triad per- 
formed penance by standing for a thousand years 



52 INDIA. 

on one foot and then fearing that in its descent to 
earth it might be lost in spray, he plaited his hair 
above his head, and let the sacred stream flow 
over himself on to the snowy peaks of the Hima- 
layas, and away, away, and away, fifteen hundred 
miles to the sea. 

To think of it, to dream of it, a hundred leagues 
away, to say Gunga! Gunga ! (Ganges ! Ganges !) 
will wash away the sins of a hundred births. If 
so much as a bone of one's body, a hair of his 
head, the parings of his finger-nails, get into the 
Ganges, though he had been in the nethermost 
hell a thousand years, he would be instantly trans- 
ported to heaven. 

Something of a Hindu's regard for the waters 
of the Ganges, may be learned from the following 
stanza : 

"The jewels of Punna are costly and rare ; 
The silks of Umritsur are matchlessly fair; 
But the waters of Gunga in beauty outvie 
All the gems of the earth, all the stars of the sky. 
Her fountains are pure as the snows of Kedar, 
And her stream as it flows no fouiness can mar; 
But where Kashee's high temples eternally shine, 
Each wave is a god, and each drop is divine." 



INDIA. 53 

The crowds who attend the great melas on the 
Ganges are beyond computation, and the cruel- 
ties connected with the exposure of the sick and 
dying on its banks, and the disgusting scenes of 
the corpses floating on the sacred stream are be- 
yond our space, our taste or our pen. It is im- 
possible to even mention the ceremonies, and 
theories about them, which obtain in relation with 
this Hindu philosophy. 

Siva Worship. — The aboriginal non-Aryan has 
influenced the Vedic Hindu, to worship stumps of 
wood, trees, stones, and village gods of unhewn 
stone or clay. The ritual of Siva worship preserves 
evidence of its double origin, the non-Aryan ele- 
ment forcing the bloody sacrifice of countless 
victims at the feet of Kali, and of human victims 
too, when unrestrained by foreign power. 

Hinduism is Multiform. — The late Dr. Wil- 
son of Bombay, thus characterizes Brahmanism. 
He says : "Hinduism, though it has gone through 
many changes, is still the grandest embodiment of 
Gentile error. It is at once physiolatrous and 



54 INDIA. 

fetish, polytheistic and pantheistic, idolatrous and 
ceremonious yet spiritual ; authoritative and tradi- 
tional, yet inventive and accommodative. The 
lower classes it leaves in ignorance; the indolent 
and inane in repose. To the curious and inquisi- 
tive it furnishes in its remarkable schools of philo- 
sophy, systems of combined physics and metaphy- 
sics, at once empirical and deductive, and which 
exercise and yet weaken and pervert the intellect- 
ual faculties, and that without any clear recogni- 
tion of moral obligation and duty to God or man. 
To the lovers of excitement and amusement, it 
furnishes a boundless store of myths, fables and 
fictions. To the active and superstitious, it affords 
a never ending round of foolish and frivolous 
ceremonies, which engross most of their time and 
energies. To the rich and wealthy and powerful 
it literally promises and sells pleasure in this 
world, with the expectancy of its continuance in 
those which it is hoped will come. Those who 
love to rove it sends on distant journeys and pil- 
grimages. Those who are morbid and melancholy 



INDIA. 55 

it settles on hills of ashes. Those who are tired 
of life it directs to the funeral pile, the idol car, or 
the lofty precipice. To those who are afraid of 
sin, it prescribes easy and frivolous penances, or 
directs to the sacred lake or river, in which they 
may be cleansed from all pollution. Those who 
need a mediator, it commends to the Guree ; who 
will supply all deficiencies and demands. To those 
who are afraid of death, it gives the hope of future 
birth, which may either be in a rising or descend- 
ing scale. Those who shrink from these repeated 
births in human and infra-human forms, it directs 
to the absorption or the Vedantist or the Nirvana, 
the totally unconscious existence or absolute ex- 
tinction of the faith of Buddhist or Jain. Indeed we 
well say that Hinduism has had its million of 
votaries, and that with some conspicuous losses, 
it has retained them for thousands of years up to 
the present day. 

Hinduism is Fetishism. — Sir Alfred Lyell in 
his "Asiatic Studies " says : " The average middle 
class Hindu might be brought by one part or 



56 INDIA. 

another of his every-day religious practice within 
any or many of these classes, namely : 

"i. The worship of mere stocks and stones, and 
of local configurations which are unusual or gro- 
tesqe in size, shape, or position. 

2. The worship of things inanimate which are 
gifted with mysterious motion. 

3. The worship of animals which are feared. 

~ 4. The worship of visible things, animate or 
inanimate, which are directly or indirectly useful 
and profitable, or which possess any incomprehen- 
sible function or property. 

5. The worship of a Deo, or spirit, a thing 
withoutTorm, and void — the vague impersonation 
of the uncanny sensation that comes over one at 
certain places. 

6. The worship of dead relatives and other 
deceased persons known in their lifetime to the 
worshiper. 

7. The worship of persons who had a great 
reputation during life or who died in some strange 
or notorious way — at shrines. 



INDIA. 57 

8. The worship in temples, of the persons be- 
longing to the foregoing class, as demigods or 
subordinate deities. 

9. The worship of manifold local incarnations 
of the elder deities, and of their symbols. 

10. The worship of department deities. 

1 1. The worship of supreme gods of Hinduism, 
and of their ancient incarnations and personifica- 
tions as handed down by the Brahmanic scriptures. 

'* It may be said of all (except the latest classes 
in the series) that these ideas are not so much the 
offspring of Brahmanism as its children by adop- 
tion ; they have not sprung out of any authoritative 
teaching or revelation, which would control and 
guide their development, nor are they the decay- 
ing survivals, either of a higher faith or of a lower 
superstition. They are living and fertile concep- 
tions of species constantly germinating, and 
throwing up new shoots, in the present age and 
country where they are found." 

Hinduism is a Moral Failure.— The popular 
Hindoo religious ceremonial is often saunginary, 



y 



58 INDIA. 

cruel and debasing. Kali but represents a 
pantheon of despicable characters. She is a 
female Satan. Her eyes are red, her eye- 
brows bloody, and blood-streams rush over her 
breast. A tiger's blood will appease her for lOO 
years, that of a lion, a reindeer or a man for looo 
years, and that of three men for ten hundred 
thousand years. Her professional devotees are the 
highway robbers and murderers, dreaded through 
all India, known as Thugs. Their instruments of 
death are consecrated to her, and their victims im- 
molated in her honor. She helps them to hide the 
corpses of their slain. The first day of her annual 
festival ends in great debauchery and shameless 
licentiousness, the intoxicant arak being conse- 
crated to her. Immense sums of money are ex- 
pended in her worship. Mr. Ward estimated 
;^45,ooo a year to be spent at the single shrine in 
Calcutta. Individuals have been known to spend 
^50,000 at a single festiv^al. 

The Golden Temple in Benares is filled with 
obscene idols. The Sacred cows wander around 



INDIA. 59 

the enclosure, and women wash their faces with the 
holy excrements. The Linga is worshiped every- 
where. The Monkey Temple of Banares contains 
hundreds of these creatures. Superstition enters 
into the life of the most learned as into that of the 
most ignorant. At the birth of a child, the build- 
ing of a house, the digging of a well, signs and 
omens must be observed. 

The Temple of Jagannath is in Pooree and 
renders the whole district sacred. "The gods of 
heaven send showers of scented flowers upon the 
city" * * "all the celestial deities would delight 
to become incarnate there" * * the very "dust 
of the city is pure gold, and the great idol so 
mighty and gracious that he pardons the sins of 
those who may have killed a million Brahmans." 
So teach these priests, and hundreds of pilgrim 
hunters traverse India from end to end, to induce 
men and women of every caste and condition to 
go on pilgrimage to this shrine, and seldom lead 
less than 5C0,000 pilgrims to undertake the task, 
and however great the number, or distant the 



6o INDIA. 

place, they are all carefully recorded. Their pro- 
gress day by day is noted and the time of their 
probable arrival at Pooree. 

Mr. Hunter estimates that not less than ten 
thousand peasants annually sacrifice their lives to 
a pilgrimage to Jagannath. He says that by the 
time the car is erected the "temple cooks make 
their calculation for feeding ninety thousand 
mouths ;" at another festival they provide for 
seventy thousand, and at the full moon festival, for 
forty thousand pilgrims. 

They seek to prevent the wealthy from saving 
anything for their return. Many a rich man has 
been known to spend ^25,000 during his stay 
of a few days. 

Mr. Hunter says the income of the temple at 
Orissa is ;^3 1,000 a year from fixed sources, and 
that this represents but a fraction of the whole. 
" Not a day passes without long trains of foot-sore 
travelers arriving at the shrine. * * * ^^ 
one comes empty-handed. The richer pilgrims 
heap gold and silver and jewels at the feet of the 



INDIA. 6 1 

god, or spread before him charters and title-deeds 
conveying rich lands in distant provinces. Every 
one, from the richest to the poorest, gives beyond 
his ability ; and many cripple their fortunes for 
the rest of their lives in a frenzy of liberality. 
Thousands die on the way back, from not having 
kept enough to support them on the journey. But 
even when the unhappy pilgrim has given his last 
rupee, the priests do not suffer him to depart; 
some shrine still remains to be witnesed, or some 
blessing to be obtained. The devotee, in a fever 
of apprehension lest any of the objects of his 
pilgrimage should remain unaccomplished, gives 
a bond to be paid on his return homiC. An en- 
gagement of this kind is so inviolable, that the 
priests do not even think it needful to take it upon 
stamped paper. The poor pilgrim probably never 
reaches his native country ; but the next time a 
pilgrim-hunter visits the dead man's village, he 
produces the bond, and it is paid without cavil." 

Besides the disease and death, we have the 
attendant crime of the festivals. A native Pundit 



62 INDIA. 

told Mr. Evans, a missionary, that these festi- 
vals were the curse of the country and tended to 
perpetuate licentiousness and adultery. "The 
women" said he, "are worse than the men, and at 
these festivals they think they are at liberty 
to break their marriage vows. The remarkable 
number of Hindu widows in attendance at these 
festivals, speaks volumes to those who are in- 
formed of widow life in that land. The temples 
too, have their own professional dancing- women* 
numbering thousands, thus making lewdness a 
necessary attachment of the temple and licentious- 
ness a part of its sacred ritual." 

A competent authority says : "It is impossible 
to conceive of the hardness of heart, blasphemy, 
lying, disobedience to parents, incontinency, adul- 
tery, filthy talking, and nameless vices that prevail 
in this city." 

The Indian Mirror is a vernacular paper pub- 
lished in Calcutta, edited by a native, and yet that 
editor thus writes describing the state of things 
amongst his own people : "A curious circum- 



INDIA. 6^ 

stance is brought to notice, showing to what depth 
Hinduism is degraded. Both in Madras and 
Bombay little girls are given in marriage to a 
deity, only that they may become 'licensed prosti- 
tutes,' or rather ' consecrated harlots. ' They 
always have their dwellings close to the temple of 
the idol, and they offer themselves to the wor- 
shipers of the deity, and their gains are supposed 
to lead to the salvation of the worshipers ! The 
deity to whom these girls are married in Bombay 
is styled Khundoba." 

Again in referring to some of their festivals, he 
says, in an editorial: " There are certain seasons 
of festival like the Holee, when the Hindustani 
population of the city revels and rots in obsceni- 
ties, the parallel of which is to be seldom found in 
the world. No respectable woman passing 
through the native quarter is safe, no pure-minded 
man can sit in his office or parlor for half an hour 
without having his ears assailed by filthy language 
which nearly drives him mad. Year after year 
this goes on unchecked. Well-clad and decent- 



64 INDIA. 

looking Rabus who, in any assembly, would pass 
for educated and enlightened men, take delight in 
exchanging jokes and expressions, in singing 
songs, and reading books which in any other 
country would compel them to see the gaol." 

In speaking of Northwest India he says : 

** In no part of India is indecent language in 
such universal use as in the Punjab, and notably 
in Lahore, Women of respectable families would 
go about the streets in crowds chanting the most 
abominable verses that a corrupt imagination 
could invent." 

Of Calcutta with its more than a million of 
inhabitants he says : 

" Calcutta, as the chief city of Bengal, is the very 
focus of all manner of obscenity. Houses of ill 
fame being promiscuously interspersed in every 
locality and neighborhood, the wretched inmates 
and frequenters thereof, in day and night, utter 
abominations which often make life in decent 
households a sore trial. The language of the 
lower orders of the people is reckless, and when- 



INDIA. 65 

ever the slightest occasion for anger and provoca- 
tion presents itself, becomes as immoral and vile 
as possible. 
Hinduism has Degraded Woman. — We 

write of it, not as restrained by British bayonets, 
but as developed without interference. The fear- 
ful infanticide of girl children among the Rajputs, 
but represents the low estimate placed on the life 
of the female whenever, from any cause or caprice, 
it is thought desirable to get quit of the girls. The 
report of the magistrate who investigated the crime 
of female infanticide in 1 871, reads like a romance 
'* set on fire of hell." The report says: *'The 
" Baboos of Bhudawur Kalan live in ten villages, 
" in seven of which I found 104 boys and one 
" girl. Their other villages are said to contain 
" two girls. They admit that for ten years there 
" has been but one girl married in all those villages. 
"They have been always an unfeeling sect. Their 
" villages are notorious for Suttee monuments, and 
" their tanks are said to be deep with infants' 
" bones. * * Next come the Baboos of 



66 INDIA. 

" Nag-pore, who live in twenty-seven villages. In 
"the nineteen visited I found 210 boys and 45 
" girls. In fifteen of the villages no marriage of 
" a girl had taken place for a decade. In their 
"three remaining villages there would appear to 
"be three girls. The Baboos of Ramgurh live in 
" sixteen villages. In the nine villages visited I 
" found 71 boys and 7 girls. In four of these no 
" girls exist and in seven no girl has been married 
" for at least ten years. The Baboos of Purtab- 
" gurh live in five villages. In the two visited I 
" found 3 1 boys and i girl. One girl is said to 
" exist in their other three villages. The Baboos 
" of Asagpoor preserve their old reputation. They 
" have 20 boys and no girl has ever been known 
" in their village." 

We need not explain the theory of brotherhood 
which induces these tribes to seek wives from be- 
yond their own clan, nor need we refer to the 
marvellous fact that they can obtain wives from 
other sects, though the parents of such girls know 
that their female offspring will be thus slaughtered; 



INDIA. (ij 

nor shall we quote farther from this report or from 
other reports, to prove that this damning stain of 
foul and unnatural murder rests on the people of 
this part and other parts of the land and has rotted 
and rots the social life of India. 

The low moral tone of society has had much to 
do with instigating child marriages. The girl is 
in disgrace if not married at the earliest period at 
which she may become a mother. To insure and 
provide for such marriage, mere babes are be- 
trothed, and are married when from eight to 
fourteen years of age. To secure the marriage of 
the girl, it must often be accompanied with a 
dowry ruinous to the parents. The chances 
against suitable marriages and the financial ability 
to secure them become great, and the temptation to 
the destruction of infant girls is thus enhanced, and 
even when girl- infanticide is arrested by British 
interference, girls can be destroyed by neglect and 
exposure, and the return to the Government be 
made, as it was in the city of Umritsur, that 300 



68 INDIA. 

girls had been destroyed by wolves in that city in 
a single year. 

The Government of India has recently taken 
the census of all India, and the statistical tables 
thereof lie before the writer. According to this 
Government report, there were in the Northwest 
Provinces alone 280,790 married girls under nine 
years of age, and over a million (1,164,564) mar- 
ried girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. 
Between the ages of five and nine, there were 
twenty per cent more deaths among the girls than 
among the boys of like age, and between the ages 
ot ten and fourteen years, this disparity of mortal- 
ity among the girls over the boys rose to thirty 
per cent. This is not necessarily attributable to cli- 
matic effects on the female constitution, for among 
the Christian girls and boys of the ages specified, 
the mortality rates were about equal. 

The low moral tone of the people has re- 
stricted the liberty of the women so that such 
a thing as " society " is impossible. Since the 
Mahommedans entered India the higher classes 



INDIA. 69 

of women have been immured in Zenanas, as the 
only security against wholesale destruction of the 
social order. And the best friends of good morals 
would not see these restraints removed even now, 
because of the moral weakness and wickedness of 
the community. We have no purpose to describe 
the childishness and helplessness of these forty 
millions of women, thus "immured like caged 
birds beating their tired wings against the prison 
walls vainly yet eagerly longing to know some- 
thing of what is beyond." 

These women and girls have been kept in 
illiteracy for more than a thousand years. Foreign 
effort has accomplished much to remove their 
ignorance yet these streaks of light do little more 
than emphasize the darkness. Seventy thousand 
girls were reported as being able to read and write 
in all India in 1881. Yet in 1882 it was estimated 
that 2,800,000 girls were still untaught, in the 
Madras Presidency alone. 

This same census of the Government of India 
shows that out of the total of 21,195,313 women 



70 INDIA. 

and girls in the Northwest Provinces, only 9,771 
were under instruction, and only 21,590 were able 
to read and write. The contrast stands thus : 

Number of womaa ands'i'^ls ia Northwest Proviaces 21,193,313 

Total able to read and write and under instruction 31,361 

Twenty-one million one hundred and sixty-three 
thousand nine hundred and fifty-two are therefore 
in absolute illiteracy, in this portion of India alone ! 

Is there anything more despicable on the face 
of this globe than the polygamous courses of the 
Koolan Brahmans ? These beastly priests marry 
girls that often remain at their fathers' houses. 
They sometimes marry into forty or fifty houses, 
and are known to have more than a hundred wives, 
receiving with each a large dowry, fathers making 
any sacrifice to marry their daughters to them, to 
secure thereby the eternal happiness of these poor 
deceived women. 

The Hindu Widow has troubles that are well 
enough known but cannot be named. If the boy- 
husband of the Hindu girl die, though it were a 
day after the marriage, the girl is a life-long 



INDIA. 71 

widow. The census of India shows that there are 
not less than 77,l^S widows under 10 years of 
age, and 281,399 widows under 15 years of 
age. Suttee, in the former times was the 
alternative gladly accepted by the Hindu widow, 
to the misery and disgrace of a survival in widow- 
hood. For fifty years, widows unnumbered have 
reproached the Government that closed this door 
of escape from shame and sin. 

The large number of Hindu widows is indicated 
by a late census of Calcutta which showed that 
there were 58,000 wives and 55,000 widows in that 
city. The common term for widow and harlot in 
Bengal is the same. All, however, are not vile 
but the temptations are too great for the vast 
majority of them. "They are as a class, mute, 
and hence much of their suffering is un- 
known, and of their sin unnamed. Isolation and 
harsh treatment drive them often to despair, and 
hence the vast number of suicides among them, as 
shown by the British census. The widow must 
eat but one meal of rice in twenty-four hours, and 



72 INDIA. 

at seasons, fast for two or three consecutive days. 
If a dying widow ask for water on a fast day a few 
drops are dropped into her ear. Childless widows 
are not allowed to possess property. There are 
exceptional cases as of some favorite daughter, 
where all this is modified. 

If the same ratio holds over India as obtains in 
the Northwest Provinces, of the entire female 
population of all ages, from infancy to old age, 
one-sixth are widows! Of the 21,195,313 women 
and girls of all ages there were 3,622,107 widows ! 
One in every six of the females of a land, doomed 
to a desolate, degraded life, and in awful proportion, 
to disgrace and crime ! In the name of common 
humanity we indict the system of religion, and the 
religious social order which admits of, encourages 
and compels, such dethronement of woman from 
her sphere, and dooms her to a living death, and 
a shameful life ! 

"He who doth execute the judgment of the 
widow," and that said "Ye shall not afflict any 



INDIA. 73 

widow," will have a fearful reckoning with Hin- 
duism. 

One further illustration may be given of the 
estimate in which Hinduism holds woman. A 
native gentleman high up in the educational 
department of India, to whose discretion was left 
the selection of many vernacular books for a 
Government college and schools, has published a 
book in Hindi under the title of ''A Catechism on 
Moral Subjects^' which contains the following : 

Q. What is the dreadful hell ? A. One's own 
body. Q. Which is the chief gate to hell ? A. 
Women. Q. What bewitches like wine ? A. 
Women. Q. What are the things which a man 
should give up in this world ? A. Gold, i. e,, 
riches and women. Q. Who is the wisest of the 
wise ? A. He who has not been deceived by 
women, who may be compared to malignant 
fiends. Q. What are fetters to men ? A. Women. 
Q. W^hat is it which cannot be trusted ? A. 
Women. Q. What poison is that which appears 
like nectar ? A. Women. 



74 INDIA. 

This book has been published for eighteen 
years. This translation is made from the third 
edition. We may ask what must be the effect on 
the youth of a nation who are taupfht such senti- 
ments in regard to the mothers, sisters, wives and 
daughters of a land ? 

Let no one think that there is lack of latent 
mental force among the women of India. The 
great mass of them are now too childish for com- 
panionship and too helpless for self dependence, 
only because they have been without opportunity 
to become otherwise through a thousand years. 
And yet out of this darkness, this bondage, this 
degredation have come, through that same thou- 
sand years, women of noble qualities and renown, 
as heroic and as capable as most of the monarchs 
who have sat on the royal miisniids of that land 

The land that has produced the beautiful 
Sultana Rezia of Delhi, whose lather declared 
"the burden of power is too heavy for my sons, 
even though I had twenty such, but not too much 
for Rezia ;" the land that produced the Hindu 



INDIA. 75 

Queen Durghetti and the brave and skilful Chand 
Sultana, the favorite heroine of the Deccan, 
famous for her defense of Ahmudnugger; the 
land that produced the noble-blooded and beautiful 
Noor yehan, so experienced in statecraft ; the land 
that produced the able and acute Ranee of jfhansi, 
mistress of dissimulation and diplomacy, the siege 
and taking of whose capital in the mutiny added 
such lustre to Sir Hugh Rose and his regiments ; 
and the land that could furnish on the other side 
the Begum of Bhopal, sheltering British officers 
and furnishing England with soldiers and supplies, 
being resolute, able and of lofty aspirations 
throughout her reign ; the land that in our time 
has furnished the Mahratti woman, Pundita Rama 
Bat, educated, talented, going from city to city in 
India in the interests of social and intellectual 
reform among her Indian sisters : such a land, 
we may rest assured, has latent intellectual force 
among its women, hid in the humble village, cur- 
tained in the palace, dreaming through the long 
days, and pining through the nights, feeding per- 



^6 INDIA. 

chance on itself, which only awaits the inspiration 
of a new thought to stir it, a new phase of life to 
attract it to other and better development, a new 
religious impulse to move it and possibly with it, 
all India. 

BuddMsm. — There are periods of contempo- 
raneous perturbations of religious thought in 
regions of the earth widely separated from each 
other. At one of these periods Buddhism 
appeared on the plains of Hindustan. The Jews 
were in Babylon, the Orphic brotherhood were 
stimulating religious thought in Greece, Confucius 
was re-stating the ancient doctrines of China, and 
Zoroastrianism was thrilling Persia, when Budd- 
hism and Brahmanism, after having existed 
together for a thousand years, as sectarian schools 
of thought of the same religious system, became 
hostile in their rivalry, and organized into inde- 
pendent and opposing communions. One is not 
older than the other. Previous to 600 B. C. they 
were co-ordinate and equal parts of the one body. 

They are scarcely more than that even now. 



INDIA. 77 

Max Muller has well said that Buddhism is " in 
many points merely Brahmanism in disguise." 
Another learned author designates it as "a variety 
of Hinduism," and others deny to it all originality 
whatsoever. There is no doubt but that '* com- 
bined research brings out more and more clearly 
the close internal relationship between the two 
systems." 

Their correspondencies are patent and plain. 
The deepest root-thoughts of their creeds are the 
same. In each (i) God is an infinite and unalter- 
able being. (2) All else only seems to exist. (3) 
This seeming or illusion must be removed. (4) 
They both teach transmigration. (5) The Budd- 
hist ascetic observes in minute detail the mode of 
life ofthe Brahman faquer. 

Their dissimilarities are not far to seek. They 
differ as to the means for the removal of the 
illusion of soul. Brahmanism teaches that it must 
be by ceremonial observances, Buddhism by the 
moral quality of actions. They differ as to what 
it is that undergoes metempsychosis ; Brahman- 



78 INDIA. 

ism says it is personal, Buddhism asserts it to be 
the aggregated moral quality of the individual. 
As we sow, we must reap ; no evil is unpunished, 
no good unrewarded. This total merit or demerit 
of one's actions is styled Karma, and it is this, not 
the man, that moves on mto other forms of more 
or less miserable existence. Man is a moral 
machine. The goal to be desired is Nirvana^ 
defined by some as extinction of being, by others 
as cessation from sin and sorrow, and by others 
still, as the cessation from successive existence. 
No individual expects to attain to it. He is blown 
out ; the aggregated moral quality of his life alone 
survives. 

Buddhism acknowledges no caste, and admits 
of no sacrifices. Its externals are monks and 
mendicants, the reading of the bana or sacred 
scripture, celibacy of the priests, and their poverty 
too, for their personal possessions are limited to a 
razor, a needle and a water-strainer ; though the 
temple-lands yield great revenue. At Maligawa 
in Ceylon, a relic of Buddha's collar bone is 



INDIA. 79 

venerated, and his left canine tooth, exhibited on a 
silver table, in a room curtained with silk em- 
broidery. 

Monier Williams says : '* Pure Buddhism does 
not exist any longer in India. Its offshoot 
Jainism, the home of cold indifferentism, wholly 
unworthy to be called a religion at all, has taken 
its place. Great numbers of the Baniahs or 
traders of the West of India, who claim to be 
Vaisyas, are Jains. If a Jain wishes to acquire 
religious merit, he either builds a new temple to 
hold an image of one or all of the 24 Jain 
saints, or a hospital for the care of worn out 
animals. No one thinks of repairing the work 
of his predecessor, though it be that of his own 
father. At Palaitna, in Gujarat, there are hun- 
dreds of new temples by the side of decaying 
old ones." 

Brahmanism and Buddhism have modified each 
other. Buddha incarnated to redeem the world, 
compelled Brahmanic priests to popularize the 
Vedic gods into Vishnuism with its series of 



So INDIA. 

incarnations. It is claimed that the principle of 
brotherhood, the gentleness and the charity of the 
poor-laws of the Hindus are survivals of Buddhist 
influence. On the other hand, in Ce\]on Buddhists 
erect small temples to Hindu gods, and observe 
the annual nine-days' feast of Kandy. 

Buddhism is Insufficient and Unsatisfy- 
ing— Brahmanism is limited by the Hindoo law 
of inheritance ; Buddhism asserts itself as a 
universal faith. It may be true that Buddhism 
''has created a literature for half the human race, 
and modified the beliefs of the other half," yet 
it is more certainly true that not even in Ceylon 
or any other Buddhist country in the world is 
Buddhism the only religion of the people. 

Rev. Samuel Langdon, after long residence in 
Ceylon, says : " You take up that exquisite and 
beautiful poem, the * Light of Asia,' for instance, 
and you are thrilled with the story you have there 
of the self-sacrifice of the Indian prince who 
founded the Buddhist religion, and then you are 
carried away in charming English verse as you 



INDIA. 8 1 

listen to the sermon of the yellow-robed monk, 
preached before his father's court ; but the Budd- 
hism of these little beautifully-bound volumes of 
poetry is but a small part of Buddhism — the best 
part of it. There is another part — a bigger and a 
blacker part — and it is that little bit of goodness 
and beauty which you meet in the volumes of 
poetry which makes this heathen system a com- 
paratively difficult thing for the Christian mission- 
aries to grapple with. I remember that 

A lie which is all a lie may bp met with, and fousht out right; 
But a lie which is half a truth is a harder matter to fight. 

"And we acknowledge that there is a little starve- 
ling soul of good in this evil thing; but, on the 
other hand, we cannot shut our eyes to the blacker 
part of this Buddhism, to the dark atheism which 
lies at its roots, to the moral depravity, the horrible 
superstition, the dense ignorance which ever 
accompany its growth, and are now identified with 
its name. The fact is, the Buddhism of to-day is 
a very different thing from the Buddhism preached 
by the Indian prince who established that re- 
ligion/' 



82 INDIA. 

Rev. R. Collins of Ceylon, principal of Trinity 
college, says : "We must be prepared to find that 
there is little moral force in modern Buddhism," 
There is profound appreciation of morality and a 
noble code of ethics, but there is no motive 
sufficient to incite to high moral living. 

Rev. Dr. Thoburn, writing from Burmah, says: 
**Buddhism is not dead. It is a great power in the 
earth, and yet of all great religions has the least 
to oflfer its devotees. . It is characteristic of modern 
unbelief, that when it sought among the religions 
of mankind for something to set over against 
Christianity it made choice of the most hollow 
and least hopeful of all the mis-faiths of misguided 
men." 

Thibet has Buddhism modified from that of 
Ceylon or Burmah, and yet the Moravian mission- 
aries of Lahoul say it "has converted the savage 
Thibetan into an apparently harmless, but, in 
reality, into an utterly false and hypocritical being 
whose true character rarely comes to light." 



INDIA. 83 

Everywhere its results are similar. An 
American Bishop of Shanghai testifies as follows : 

** For more than twenty years I have been a 
student of Buddhism ; I have thoroughly studied 
the Buddhist books, which in themselves consti- 
tute a vast literature ; I have talked with 
hundreds of Buddhist priests and monks — 
Chinese, Mongolian, and Thibetan ; I have visited 
many Buddhist temples, I have even lived in 
such. Therefore, laying aside all mock modesty, 
in a matter that so closely concerns the Church, 
I feel competent to state that a more gigantic 
system of fraud, superstition, and idolatry than 
Buddhism as it is now, has seldom been inflicted 
by any false religion upon mankind." 

Parsi-ism. — " If the battles of Marathon and 
Salamis had been lost * * * the state religion 
of the Empire of Cyrus might have become the 
religion of the civilized world," but the religion of 
Ormuzd, "once the terror of the world, is now, and 
has been for the last thousand years, a mere 
curiosity in the eyes of the historian." 



84 INDIA. 

Practically Zoroastrianism was and is idolatrous. 
Dr. Wilson translates a portion of their Scriptures 
thus : 

" I worship Hormazd, the pure, master of 
" purity. I worship Zoroaster, the pure, master of 
" purity. I worship the whole body of Hormazd. 
"I worship all the long existences (the beings 
"which are to exist 12,000 years). I worship all 
" the pure celestial and terrestrial Izads (angels). 
" I worship all the fountains of water, flowing and 
*' stationary. I worship all the trees and trunks, 
** and lofty branches, and fruit. I worship the 
"whole earth. I worship the whole heaven. I 
" worship all the stars, the moon, and the sun. 
" I worship the primeval lights. I worship all the 
*' animals, both aquatic and terrene. I worship all 
"the mountains, the purely pleasurable. I worship 
" all the fires." 

He summarises some of their superstitions as 
follows : 

"The mending of holes formed in the earth, 
through which the devils are supposed to emerge 



INDIA. 85 

from hell; the feeding of the hungry flame with 
grease and fat and sweet-smelling odors ; the 
muttering and sputtering of prayers and praises 
in an unknown tongue to every object that 
exists; the disposal of corpses so as to pollute 
the atmosphere rather than the earth ; the 
solemn funeral of bones and hair and nails ; the 
scrubbing and rubbing of the body, with various 
ablutions, for the expulsion of devils ; the 
frightening and driving away of demons by 
noises ; the introduction of dogs to survey the 
bodies of the deceased and to prognosticate and 
guard them from the assaults of Satan ; and 
many other practices said to be enjoined by 
divine authority and to be good and virtuous 
actions, do not certainly commend themselves to 
the reason of many of those with whom tyrant 
custom compels their observance." 

Expelled by the Moslem from Persia, the Parsi 
exiles landed on the west coast of India. They 
are the merchant-princes of Bombay. A financial 
failure among them would disturb every bourse of 



86 INDIA. 

the world. They are conducting European trade 
in every military station of India. They number 
possibly not more than 1 50,000 in India, but their 
influence is greatly disproportionate to their num- 
bers. Their wide commercial connections gives 
them great acquaintance with affairs in India, and 
their ancient families are still preserved, four- 
hundred-thousand strong in the home land of 
Persia, where an oppressed remnant of them still 
keep up their altar fires. 

They object to being called "Fire worshippers." 
They revere the earth quite as much as they do 
fire, and water, and dogs as well. Fire fed with 
fragrant spices, and treated as if it were a god, is 
kept continually burning in their temple, and each 
head of a family must keep a perpetual fire in his 
dwelling. 

Being Zoroastrians they should acknowledge 
the Zend Aresta as their sacred book, but it ap- 
pears to have fallen out of mind or out of use. 
The yami i-yamsheed, a Parsi journal, lamenting 
the gross neglect of the Parsi youth, says "it 



INDIA. 87 

formerly formed a part of a Parsi child's instruc- 
tion to understand parts of the Zend-Aresta." 

They are monogamists and observe a species of 
caste purity in their food, never eating beef, pork 
or ham, nor any food cooked by any other than 
a Parsi. Those of them who cling to the old 
ways, must pray sixteen times a day, and use 
filthy excrements on their person in their cere- 
monial purification. 

They neither bury nor burn their dead, but on 
som,e high hill build a "Tower of Silence ;" over 
the top of which is a grate like a whififle-iron, on 
which they place the corpses of their friends, and 
leave them exposed to vultures, or until decom- 
posed, when the bones are burnt and the ashes 
thrown into a well or elsewhere. The reason of 
this is, they say that no violence should be done 
by man to himself or others, and therefore no 
harm should be done to earth, air or water by 
burying the dead. They have deep wells to catch 
the water from this "Tower of Silence," and the 



88 INDIA. 

birds eat the flesh, and the fire consumes the 
bones. 

A " catechism " has of late years been in use 
amongst them, in which there is much truth 
beautifully expressed, some evident thrusts at the 
Roman Catholic priests, and some at the whole 
doctrine of the atonement. It says, a Parsis is 
oblij^ed to " know God as one, to know the 
prophet, the exalted Zurthost, to believe in the 
goodness of God, to avoid evil deeds." " There 
is no Savior. Tn the other world, you shall receive 
the return according to your actions. Your 
Savior is your deeds and God himself" But it is 
only of late that the Catechism itself, has formed 
a part of a Parsi child's education. 

Yet they are proud of the antiquity of their 
religious faith, and are loth to reh'nquish the 
**heir-loom" of their ancestors. They cling to 
forms of ancient prayer, of which not a dozen 
amongst them know the meaning, and are without 
a pulpit. According to Dadabhai Naorroji, there 
are amongst them a class of reformers, and a 



INDIA. 89 

liberal school, who are seeking the change of some 
of their disgustingly filthy religious and social 
ceremonies ; the reduction of the number of 
obligatory prayers ; the prohibition of early be- 
trothals; the education of the female members of 
their community ; the reduction of wedding ex- 
penditures, and other modifications of their social 
life. 

Islam. — Simultaneously with the expulsion of 
Buddhism from the continent of India Muhamma- 
danism arose in Arabia and Christianity was 
introduced to the Saxons in Briton. Now the 
Christian Queen of England rules more Moslems 
than the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of Turkey 
both together. 

Muhammad, born in 570 A. D., died 632 A. D., 
having created a conquering faith, under whose 
green banner the hosts of his followers have 
marshalled for twelve centuries. To-day, num- 
bering possibly 175 millions they are found 
through 75° of latitude and 160° of longitude 
speaking more than thirty different languages, 



90 INDIA. 

observing a variety of customs, yet compacted by 
their common scriptures, forming a fellowship of 
faith from the equatorial regions of Africa to the 
snows of Siberia, and from the Chinese seas to 
the Gambia and the Gold Coast of Africa on the 
Atlantic. 

Within a century after the prophet's death the 
crescent gleamed over Northern Africa and 
Southern Europe, and the Moslem burnished his 
scimitar at the gates of Hindustan in the passes 
of the Hindu-Kush. 

These conquering hordes had, however, to con- 
solidate their forces for three centuries more before 
they were equal to invade the packed population 
of the Punjab. Their history in India consists of 
a series of invasions and partial conquests through 
eleven centuries. They never ruled the land. 
The British took India from the Hindus, not from 
the Moghuls. 

In the Northwest where they adorned the 
capitols they built, with splendid and unsurpassed 
architecture, one third of the entire population 



INDIA. 91 

now is Moslem ; but the census of 1872 surprised 
everybody, by revealing the fact that nearly half 
the population of Lower Bengal was Muhamma- 
dan. In 1881 the census showed them to 
outnumber the Hindus. Omitting Behar, Orissa 
and Assam, the Moslems in Lower Bengal num- 
bered 17,863,411, and the Hindus 16,369,755, or 
to put it otherwise, out of a population of less 
than 35 millions nearly 18 millions were Muham- 
madans. 

Of the 40 and more millions of Moslems in 
India, not more than one-tenth are of Islamic 
descent. The others are converts or descendants 
of converts from among the Hindus and aborigines. 
The Bengali Mussulmans are not settlers from the 
west, neither are they of Aryan origin. Their 
stock is strongly Turanian. 

Muhammadanism is politically subordinate in 
India, yet the Moslem kingdom of Hyderabad is 
as large as France, and the 1 1 millions of its 
population fanatical, bigoted and powerful. Bhopal 



92 INDIA. 

is ruled by a Moslem queen, though all are 
feudatory to the Government at Calcutta. 

Muhammadans in India are much Hinduized in 
their habits, ways and beliefs. They have adopted 
caste, worship at the tombs of saints, and exhibit 
a tendency to deify Muhummad himself. Many 
regard him a sinless mediator. Relics of him are 
exhibited : a hair of his head shown at Delhi 
and Lahore, and the impress of his foot revered 
as Hindus or Buddhists would a relic of Vishnu 
or Buddha. 

In some places the lower classes of Muham- 
madans worship the Hindu goddess of small pox, 
and take part in the Holi festival. In Lower 
Bengal, Rev. R. Williams says that "trust in caste 
is the religion of Hindu and Mussulman alike, 
and both think that the unpardonable sin is to 
break caste wherever it might be. * * The 
present state of religion among them is very low, 
but it is necessary to live among them to know 
how far they have departed from the faith of 
Muhammad, and how much they are corrupted 



INT I A. 93 

by their contact with Hinduism. Thousands of 
them cannot say the simple creed in Arabic, and 
thousands who do, do not know its meaning. 
* * The Koran has not been translated among 
theni. In the rural districts of Nuddea almost 
all the houses have heathen signs upon them." 
In these districts the Hindu widowers number 
465,009, and the Hindu widows 2,655,667, while 
the Mussulman widowers numbered 220,860, and 
the widows 1,712,079. There were 12,399 Hindu 
boys and 233460 Hindu girls married in 1881 
under 9 years of age, and 19,025 Mussulman boys 
and 208,473 girls married under the same age. 

At present few converts are made to Islam in 
this region, Mr. Williams says except by "men and 
" women falling into sin, losing their own caste, 
" and sinking to the lower grades of their partners 
" in guilt." 

Rev. Mr. Sherring after years of familiarity with 
both Hindus and Mussulmans in India, says, "the 
influence of Muhammadanism in India has been 
for evil rather than good. In ancient times 



94 INDIA. 

before Islam entered the country, the Hindus 
were undoubtedly a more moral people than a*- 
present. I regard Muhammadans as among the 
most licentious people on the face of the earth. 
Wherever they go, they introduce their out- 
rageous habits. The seclusions of women in 
India is a practice entirely of Muhammadan 
origin, and polygamy was never carried out to 
such a wild extent as was permitted under 
Muhammadan rule. So that many of the gross 
vices of native society owe their main strength, 
if not their origin to the vile social usages of the 
Muhammadans. I believe that there is far more 
extreme social impropriety prevalent among Mu- 
hammadans than among the Hindus. * * 
One great inducement held out to a Hindu to 
change his creed for that of Islam is the promise 
of a wife." 

He thinks the influence of Moslems "has been 
of the most deadly and pernicious character." 

The Muhammadans in India have been sin- 
gularly behind the Hindus in availing themselves 



INDIA. 95 

of the Government facilities for Education. Here 
as everywhere there is the tendency to destruction 
of the family by Moslem polygamy and con- 
cubinage ; the same separation of moral and 
religion ; and the same Ishmaelic propensities. 

Karens. — In various portions of Burmah is a 
class of Mongolians, named by the Burmans, 
Karens, probably identical with the Ka-Khyens, 
who extend to the Shan States, and are numerous 
around Rangoon, and from Ava, 250 miles east. 
They are Turanians of doubtful, but possibly 01 
Thibetan origin, esteemed by some authorities to 
be the aborigines of Burmih. The Northern 
Karens are most advanced in civilized life. The 
Southern are the Sgau and Pgho tribes. 

Some of their traditions are remarkably analo- 
gous to Biblical history. The creation of man, 
his transgression, flood-myths, and so forth, bear 
striking resemblance to our Scriptural narrative. 
God is endless, complete, good, omnipotent ; He 
created man, and knows all things. His name 
Vwa^ is the nearest approach to Jehovah possible 



96 INDIA. 

to the language. An evil spirit has introduced 
charms, disease and death ; hence demon worship. 
They do not believe in transmigration, but many 
of them do in the immortality of the soul. 

Spirit- Ivors hip finds a place beyond Ywah and 
the demons. Every object has a Kelah, even 
inanimate objects as axes and knives and grain. 
This Kelah is not the soul : it is the author of 
dreams, it is the animal spirits, it can leave the 
body at will ; if it is away, disease ensues ; if it 
stays away death follows. It is the more apt to 
forsake feeble people and children. The Kelah of 
one person may go away with that of another. 
Tempting food is set by the wayside ; ceremonies 
and ritual resorted to, to tempt the departed Kelah 
to return. 

There are other spirit beings as Kephoo, a sort 
of vampire which destroys human Kelahs, and 
Therets and Thamus or Tak-kas, Sekkas, Pluphos, 
Tahnahs and Mtihans. The Priests or Prophets, 
called wees and bookhos, assume conditions of 
mind and body similar to those among the North 



INDIA. 97 

American Indian. The one obtain visions from 
above, the other from below. There are precepts 
which float among the people and are collected 
into a book called "The Sayings of the Elders." 

Sikhs. — When Martin Luther was revolutioniz- 
ing Western Europe, Thibet was accepting the 
form of Buddhism known as Lamaism, and Baba 
Nanak was introducing the reformation of Hindu- 
ism, known as the religion of the Sikhs. Original- 
ly Hindus, this people, 400 years ago, accepted 
the teaching of their founder who taught one 
Supreme Deity to whom praises should be offered ; 
that men ought to abandon war ; that if men 
practiced faith and good works, it does not matter 
to what caste they belong ; that the good would 
go to Paradise, and the bad be born again as 
animals such as dogs and cats. Nanak performed no 
miracles, but relied on the purity of his doctrine, 
yet his followers tell silly stories about him which 
pass for miracles. The Sikhs have a sacred book, 
the Grunth, which teaches that one omnipotent, 
omniscient, omnipresent Deity made the most 



98 INDIA. 

insignificant animal that crawls on the earth and 
the least complicated flower that decks the face of 
the desert. It teaches the fall of man and forbids 
the worship of idols. Yet the Sikhs now worship 
Nanak and place their holy book, the Grunth, in 
their temples, and strew marigolds upon it and 
worship it. 

Amritsur is their sacred city. They are scattered 
through India, especially in the British Army, but 
their home is the Punjnb, where they number over 
one million. Oscillating between Hinduism, 
Muhammadanism, and Christianity at present, 
being a warlike people occupying a key position 
on the borders of the British Indian Empire, it 
may readily be seen that they are relatively a very 
important element which may well occupy the 
statesman and divine, for it is stendfa<:tly held by 
many that the fate of British India is bound up 
with that of the Sikhs. 

Statistics '^f Beligions. — It is impossible to 
secure very exact statistics of the divergent 
religious communities of so vast and complex 



INDIA. 99 

society as that of India. The British Government 
has, however, recently taken the census of India, 
in which returns were required of this character. 
Although incomplete, the subjoined table will be 
valuable in this connection. They were compiled 
for The hidian Evangelical Review. 



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PART II 



CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA. 



"^ ever I see a Hindu converted to Jesus Christ I 
shall see something more nearly approaching the resur- 
rection of a dead body than anything I have ever yet seen.** 
— Henry Martyn. 

^^ Expect great things of God; attempt great things for 
God" — William Carey, [1792."! 

" IVe daily see Hindus of every caste becoming 
Christians, and devoted missionaries of the cross." — Indu 
Prakash, [a native paper of Bombay.] 

" Casting dow?i ifnaginations and every high thing that 
exalteth itself against the knoiuledge of Goit, and bring- 
ing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ." 
— 2 Cor. x: 5. 



CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA, 

*'The Evangrelization of India," said Dr. 
Wilson, *'is in some respects the greatest distinct- 
ive enterprise yet attempted by the church of 
Christ." '* India," he says, " still stands conspic- 
uous and claimant in the field of evangelistic 
enterprise even with China and Japan, Italy and 
Spain, and other countries marvellously open 
by the Providence of God, occupying remarkable 
positions with it in the panorama of Christian 
observation." 

S3?rian Christians.— We shall not discuss- 
the question whether Thomas the Apostle, intro- 
duced Christianity into India, nor delay to sketch 
the history and modern phases of faith and cere- 
mony of the Syrian Christians who represent the 
earliest history of Christianity in India. They 



I04 INDIA. 

grew into favor with the India powers and were 
allowed to be governed by their own Bishop. 

Koman Catholics. — Francis Xavier, " the 
Apostle of the Indies," introduced the Roman 
Catholic form of Christianity into India in 
1 541. Romanists have beatified and canonized 
this most gifted of their missionaries, on grounds 
he repudiated, and have surrounded his memory 
with legends and extravagences which add nothing 
to his honor. From the first night after his arrival 
in Goa, on to Travancore, to the Pearl fisheries in 
Comorin, and thence to Ceylon, he was ever a 
flame of fire. 

Neither the methods of Xavier nor those of his 
successors can be discussed in this connection. 
Xavier sent his catechists through the villages and 
calling the people by the ringing of a bell they 
read to them translations of the Lord's Prayer, the 
Ten Commandments and the Creed, to which, if 
they assented, they were immediately baptised in 
such numbers that Xavier wrote : " It often hap- 
pens to me that my hands fail through the fatigue 



INDIA. 105 

of baptising, for I have baptised a whole village in 
a single day." He baptised children of heathen 
parents, and multitudes who knew not the language 
in which things were told them. The Romanists 
boast of his having made as many as 10,000 
converts in a single month in Travancore. 

Accessions were made to the Roman church by 
mixed marriages of Portuguese with natives, on 
condition that the latter submitted to baptism. 
They transferred idolatrous worship from the idol 
to the crucifix, till the heathen recognized them as 
their " Little Brothers." Eight years after Xavier's 
death, Rome established the inquisition at Goa, to 
endeavor to re-imburse herself in the east, for 
the losses superinduced by the Lutheran reforma- 
tion in the west, and seriously compromised with 
the temporal powers in India. The Romanists 
claimed in 1877 over a million of adherents in all 
India, though it is difificult to reconcile this with 
the returns in the Government census of 1880. 

Early Protestant Missions. — Each period 
of the history of Missions in India, has been 



I06 INDIA. 

linked with great names and the earlier epochs are 
readily grouped around them. The Danes were 
the first European Protestants to send Missionaries 
to India, ante-dating the English by twenty 
years ; yet even they had been in India eighty 
years before they began this work in 1705. 

Ziegenbalg, the surprising student of Halle 
University, linked the revival of literature with 
which the free circulation of the Bible was con- 
nected in the west, with evangelistic labor in the 
east through his translation of the New Testa- 
ment into Tamil The work which the Danes 
inaugurated through Ziegenbalg and Plutschau, 
thev carried on throusfh the whole of the 
eighteenth century. 

Schivartz^ by birth a German, by ordination a 
Danish clergymen, by appointment of ''the Chris- 
tian Knowledge Society," connected with the 
church of England, in the middle of that same 
eighteenth century linked the work of the Danes 
with that of England. It is easy to kindle 
enthusiasm by the mention of his name.^ |Living 



INDIA. 107 

on ;^48 a year, dressed in dimity dyed black, living 
on rice and vegetables, occupying an old building 
just big enough for his bed and himself, he grew 
to such acknowledged power that when Hyder All 
struck terror throughout the Carnatic, and the 
English sent an Embassy to treat with him, the 
monarch sent them away saying : "Send me the 
Christian (Schwartz) he will not deceive me." 
Dying after forty-eight years of service he left 
10,000 converts, and the Rajah of Tanjore after 
his death, threw open his kingdom to Christianity 

Later Protestant Missions. — A golden link 
between the earlier and the later Protestant 
European missionaries, is furnished by the saintly 
Henry Martyn, who as an East Indian chaplain, 
wrought nobly for the conversion of India. 

Carey, Marshman and Ward. — A triad of 
Baptist giants stand at the portal of the present 
missionary work in India. 

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, in 
the village of Northampton, England, might have 
been seen a sign which read thus : — 



I08 INDIA. 

" Secoad Hand Shoes Bought and Sold, 

William Carey." 

This same William Carey, afterwards known as 

" the learned cobbler," came to sit " in the seat 

chief among the captains." 

The marvellous era of vernacular literature in 
India dates from the Serampore Three. When 
Carey commenced to lecture in Williams College, 
Calcutta, not a prose work e.xisted in Bengalee ! 

Carey entered India in 1793. He represents the 
best type of modern Missionary hero and reformer. 
Translating the New Testament into Bengalee; on 
a farm ; in the "factory;" in the chair of Sanskrit 
and Bengalee ; translating the Ramayana into the 
vernacular; founding a college ; helping forward 
moral and political reforms ; memoralizing the 
Government to suppress infanticide at Saugor ; and 
the abominations of Suttee ; protesting against the 
"Pilgrim tax" of the Government, or establishing 
a botanical garden, he towers sublimely as the 
representative of the noblest and broadest philan- 
thropy and aggressive Christianity. 



INDIA. 109 

"In no country in the world, and in no period 
in the history of Christianity," says an eminent 
author, "was there ever displayed such an amount 
of energy in the translation of the Sacred Scrip- 
tures from the original into other tongues, as was 
exhibited by a handful of earnest men in Calcutta 
and Serampore in the first ten years of the present 
century." 

Adoniram Judson. — " The Apostle of Bur- 
mah " links America with Europe in this grand 
work. He arrived in the east in 1 8 13 and "jeoparded 
his life unto the death in the high places of the 
field." In Burmah he found himself in a land of 
slaves ruled by a tyrant, and lived amid brutal 
murderers and vicious robbers, close to the spot of 
public execution, with his noble wife, seeking to 
set up Christ's Kingdom in the Empire of " the 
Golden Sovereign of Land and Water." Evange- 
lising the people by the way side ; preaching to 
courtiers and even to "the golden ears" of the 
throne ; enduring the terrible captivity at Ava, with 
Annie Judson to console and feed him ; shut up 



1 10 INDIA. 

with hundreds of Burmese robbers and murderers; 
secreting his manuscript translations sewed up in 
his pillow ; kissing his new born babe through the 
bars of his cell ; marching in chains with lacerated 
and bleeding feet; released; after twenty years of 
toil giving the Bible to the Burmans in their own 
tongue, and in 1830, with Mason, "The Apostle 
to the Karens," carrying the gospel to that people 
and seeing them converted by the thou- 
sands, till he could write : *' I eat the rice and fruit 
cultivated by Christian hands, look on the fields of 
Christians, see no dwellings but those of Christian 
families " — everywhere and from first to last — he is 
the same Christian, divine and hero. The work 
east of the Bay of Bengal groups itself around 
his name. 

Alexander Duff. — After being twice ship- 
wrecked on the way, Dr. Duff reached India in 1830. 
His name is the symbol of another epoch m India, 
when higher English knowledge, and Christian 
intelligence were made to begin to flow through the 
English language and literature, over all India. 



INDIA. I 1 1 

Prior to his day and efforts, all learning in the 
East was orientalized. Since Duff inaugurated 
the change, European ideas mould the mind and 
shape the thought of India on a new model. In 
nine years, the five scholars who entered his school 
on the first day, swelled into an average attendance 
of 800. 

Through Duff came the famous Educational 
Despatch of 1854 which established the Indian 
Universities; and then came the popular passion 
for degrees, and the flood gates of European 
thought and literature were opened on the plains 
of Bengal. 

GROWTH OF MODERN MISSIONS 
IN INDIA. 

The rapid spread of Christianity under the 
Apostles, and within the first three centuries, has 
been held to be amongst the collateral evidences 
of its supernatural origin. But the growth of 
Christianity in India during the first century 
after its introduction, has been shown to 



112 INDIA. 

be equal to if not greater than that of the Chris- 
tianity in all the world in the first century of the 
Christian era. 

Let it not be interposed that we have greater facil- 
ities than had they, for even that has been anticipated. 
The apostles found the Hebrew Scriptures already 
in the hands of their first converts, for these had 
been translated into Greek three centuries before, 
and thus there was a people prepared of the Lord 
both Jews and Greeks. For the first hundred 
years the Gospel did not spread among those 
attached to the soil, but was mainly confined to 
the cities and towns, and only a few Gentiles were 
at first among the converts. In seventy years 
after the first preaching of the apostles (A. D. lOo), 
it has been estimated that there were a hundred 
thousand converts. In India, seventy years after 
Carey's first baptism of a native convert, there were 
in India and British Burmah seventy-three thou- 
sand native Christian communicants, and a nominal 
Christian population among the natives, of over 
three-hundred-thousand. 



INDIA. 113 

"Almost all the great problems of humanity 
have been wrought out within small areas," said 
the able Dr. Mullens of the London Missionary 
Society, years ago, and " it was better that the 
prentice-hand of the church should be tried on an 
impressible people in the islands of the Pacific 
than in India or China." 

Yet the church since 181 3 has "tried her hand" 
somewhat with these packed populations of India, 
and with what result is shown partly by the 
statistical tables to be found in this book, and in the 
diagram on an accompanying page. 

Native Christians. — It will be seen that the 
rate of increase of the Native Christian community 
in India, Burmah and Ceylon from 185 1 to 1861, 
was 53 per cent,; and from 1 861 to 1871, it was 
61 per cent.; and from 1871 to i88r, it was 86 
per cent. It will further be noted that the number 
of communicants nearly doubled between 185 1 
and 1 86 1 ; that it more than doubled between 
186 1 and 1871 ; and that it again more than 
doubled between 1871 and 1881. 



114 INDIA. 

The relative increase in communicants is higher 
than that of the nominal Christian community, 
beingr for the decade, in Ceylon 70 per cent. ; in 
India 100 per cent. 

In 1 87 1 the compiler of the statistics estimated 
as follows: "On the supposition that a uniform 
rate of increase of 61 per cent, should continue 
until the year 1901, the number of Christians of 
that date would amount to nearly a million. 
Fifty years later it would be upwards of 11,000,- 
000, and fifty years later still, or in A. D. 2001, it 
would amount to 138,000,000." But the rate of 
increase within the last decade is 86 per cent, 
against the 61 per cent, on which he made his 
constructive argument. 

The largest aggregate increase has been in 
Madras, where 299,742 Christians are reported 
against 160,955 in 1871. The present population 
of Christians is distributed in the various provinces 
as follows : — 

Madras, 299742; Bengal, 83,583; Burmah, 
75,510; Ceylon, 35,708; Bombay, 11,691; N. W. 



INDIA. 1 1 5 

Provinces, 10,390; Central India, 4,885; Punjab, 
4,672 ; Oudh, 1,329. 

The rate per cent, of increase, however, for the 
same period would stand as follows for the various 
Provinces: Bombay, 180 per cent, ; Punjab. 155 
percent; Oudh, in percent; Central India, 92 
per cent ; Madras, 86 per cent ; Bengal, 67 per 
cent ; N. W. Provinces, 64 per cent. ; Burma, 27 
per cent 

The number of Christians in Burmah was only 
estimated, and was modestly' reckoned below 
the proportion of Christians to communicants 
which obtains elsewhere in India, and entered at 
75,000. If, however, the proportion of Christians 
to communicants is the same in Burmah as it is in 
India and Ceylon, the native Christian population 
would reach 90,000, but even the lower estimate 
given by the missionaries shows an increase of 
12,781 over the number ten years earlier (1871). 
The Ceylon figures of the tables as returned at 
the Calcutta Conference are so imperfect as not to 



Il6 INDIA. 

justify comparisons of growth. The reliable 
statistics, we are told, would show as follows : — 

The correct figures show the Baptists to have 
had a slight decrease in communicants and native 
Christians ; the Church of England Mission to 
have nearly doubled in both particulars, and the 
American Board to have an increase of communi- 
cants from II 72 in 1 871. to 4783 in i88[ ; and of 
native Christians from 992 in 1871, to 4753 in 188 1. 

The most surprising and perhaps the most 
significant increase has been in the department of 
Women's work. Not only have four new Ladies' 
Societies entered the field since 1871, but there 
has been an amazing development of indigenous 
workers. In 1871 there were 947 "Native 
Christian female agents " engaged in missionary 
work. In 1881 there were no less than 1,644. 
The number of European and Eurasian ladies, 
reported in the tables, is 541. Some of these 
were no doubt the wives of missionaries, but when 
it is remembered that very many married ladies 
who do active Christian work, were not reported 



INDIA. 117 

at all, there can be no doubt that they already 
outnumber the 586 men, who alone were returned 
as missionaries not many years ago. The pro 
gress of zenana work has been astonishing. Ten 
years ago Bengal had more zenana pupils than all 
the rest of India put together. Now the North- 
West Provinces have the largest number of this 
class of pupils. The total number of female 
pupils has increased from 31,580 to 65,761." 

"Sunday Schools appear in these tables for the 
first time and hence we cannot compare the 
present figures with those of any past date. It is 
evident, however, that there has been an enormous 
development of this department of missionary 
labor. No less than 83,321 pupils are taught in 
Sunday Schools, of whom one-fourth are non- 
Christian children." 

Self Support. — An important feature of this 
growth is that indicated by the Christianity of 
India becoming self reliant and self helpful finan- 
cially. This is found in two forms : 

{a) The European and Eurasian Christians living 



llB INDIA. 

in India, conversant with its needs, and with the 
work of the Missionaries, come more and more to 
support these efforts by contributions. As long 
ago as 1866 one-sixth of the whole cost of 
Protestant missions in India was subscribed by 
people in India, and one-fifteenth by native 
converts themselves. Rev. Dr. Mullens, in his 
statistical tables of India missions for 1871, shows 
** that ;^5o,coo sterling were annually contributed 
to the various missionary societies in India out of 
their official income, in the midst of their official 
labors, by men who were toiling in India to 
accumulate sufficient funds to enable them to retire 
to England, a fact honorable to the men, and 
decisive of the reality of the good being accom- 
plished by the missions." 

(d) The contributions of the native converts 
themselves show most encouraging growth. The 
London Missionary Society said a few years since 
of its missions on the Malabar coast : " Several of 
the churches are self-supporting; the contributions 
have reached ^7,000 a year, which, considering 



INDIA. 1 19 

what is paid for labor in that country, is equal to 
;^40,000 at least of our currency." The South 
India Mission of the Church of England Mission- 
ary Society contributed one year ;^I3,582 gold. 
In Travancore the annual contributions per member 
were creditable, and in Madras the natives gave 
an average of seventy eight cents gold. Of 
Travendum Rev. J. Duthiesaid as far backas 1866, 
that one thousand and sixty native Church mem- 
bers contributed during the year ^1,146.50 for 
Church objects. This Church is entirely self-sup- 
porting, and has a number of years past paid the 
salary of its pastor, two catechists, three school- 
masters, two Bible women and one medical 
evangelist. 

The Rohilcund District Conference of the 
Methodist Episcopal church, said in December, 
i^73» "Such a thing as total dependence on 
foreign aid is unknown in any of our churches." 

The Government for British Burmah, in its 
report for 1880-81, said of the American Baptist 
missions among the Karens: "There are now 



I20 INDIA. 

attached to this communion no less than 451 
Christian Karen parishes, most of which support 
their own church, their own Karen pastor and 
their own parish school, and many of which sub- 
scribe considerable sums of money and 'kind' for 
the furtherance of missionary work among Karen 
and other Hill races beyond the British border." 
This is often done at the cost of self-denial. 
A Baptist missionary went amongst the Karen 
Christians at one time and found that their crops 
had failed by incursions of the rats. One pastor 
had only a bushel-and-a-half of paddy. The 
deacon of the church brought the missionary 
Rupees ten, to go towards the support of the 
missionaries amongst a heathen tribe farther north. 
The missionary remonstrated against receiving it, 
saying : "It is too much ; the poor-fund of your 
church needs it." But the deacon said : "It is 
God's money ; it has been given for this mission; 
we cannot touch it ; you must take it. We can 
eat rats, but the Kha-Tchins cannot do without the 
gospel." 



INDIA. 121 

The aggregated contributions of the native 
Christian community in India, Burmah and Cey- 
lon rose from about 60,000 Rupees in 1861, to 
159,124 Rupees in 1871, and to 228,517 Rupees 
in 1881. 

This, cannot be measured by our standard- 
The mass of the people of India are very poor, 
Property is held in communal ownership, and 
when one becomes a Christian he must lose 
claim to it; many of these native converts 
are thrown out of all means of subsistence by 
becoming Christians ; some of them had more 
than one wife, and on becoming Christians, though 
they ceased to live with any but the first wife, felt 
obliged to continue to support the other wife or 
wives and their children ; many native converts 
are, at the time of their becoming Christians, 
heavily in debt, and some hopelessly so, by virtue 
of the obligations assumed in marriage of their 
children, according to heathen custom, and who- 
ever knows about this, knows that it is debt slavery 
continued sometimes through generations. It is 



122 INDIA. 

vastly to the credit of this previously enthralled 
Christian community that they give so nobly. It 
is becoming no uncommon thing for subscriptions 
amongst them for church objects to take the form 
of each giving a moniUs income. 

OTHER RESULTS. 

Secret Semi-Christians. — It is impossible to 
tell the number of persons who have been influ- 
enced by Christian teachers and the Christian 
Scriptures. Take a few illustrations of Comelms-es 
and Nicodemus-es, hidden away amongst the vast 
population, of whom now and again, one comes to 
our knowledge, and sometimes we learn of whole 
communities who have adopted some modification 
of Christian truth. 

[a) The Lticknow Witness in 1881 contained the 
following narratives : 

" Several years ago a Hindoo was living as an 
ascetic, making pilgrimages to various shrines in 
India, burdened with a sense of sin. He found 



INDIA. 123 

somewhere a small Christian tract and single 
Gospel in Hindee. Reading these he became 
convinced that they spoke of the true way to rest 
from sin. He found his way to a missionary, and 
became a Christian ; settled down to his zemindari, 
and is now a happy man. 

"A young bunya found a copy of the Sut-Mut- 
Nirupin, or 'An Inquiry into the True Religion/ 
among some old wrapping-paper, with one of his 
friends. He ran over some of the pages ; became 
interested; read more; became convinced ; found 
his way to the missionaries, and is now finishing 
a course of study in the Bareilly Theological 
Seminary, preparatory to preaching the gospel. 

"Recently a Brahmin, who lives in a village 
thirty miles distant from Bareilly, fell in with one 
of the missionaries, who was surprised to find that 
he possessed a copy of the New Testament in Hin- 
dee, purchased some time ago from a colporteur, 
and that he was familiar with the story of Christ's 
birth, temptation, miracles, life, death, etc., as 



124 INDIA. 

detailed in it. He had been reading the book 
attentively. 

" The missionaries of Bareilly and Budaon 
District have been surprised to find certain Bairagi 
Gurus possess the New Testament, and that they 
are teaching it in connection with their own books, 
and that they are becoming convinced that it 
contains the true Dharm or religion. They still 
use th^ir own books as a means of holding on to 
their people." 

{b) The following tender incident, related by 
A. H. Baynes, will touch a responsive chord in 
many a Christian heart : " I shall never forget as 
long as I live that day when in the glow of the 
eventide, as the sun was sinking and as the mists 
were creeping over the land, I walked with one of 
our native brethren by the riverside, and saw a 
light in the dim distance, when he said to me, 
* Yonder is the only Christian in all that great 
town.' Ten years ago he received Christ into his 
heart; his father and mother turned him out; his 
' friends forsook him ; his neighbors persecuted 



INDIA. 125 

him, and all these years he has stood his ground, 
scarcely getting food to eat. During all these ten 
years he maintained his Christian character, 
unspotted in the midst of the heathen around him, 
and the native brother said to me, ' Now his 
business is reviving, because people say he sells 
the best things, and always means what he says.' 
I entered his humble bamboo hut and sat down 
upon the ground by his side, and as I discoursed 
about his loneliness and his sadness, the tears 
sprang into his eyes, and he said, ' No, I am never 
lonely ; for as Christ was with the Hebrew chil- 
dren, and as He was with Daniel in the lions' den, 
so all these years has he been with me.' " 

(c) Mr. Miller tells the following incident in 
Cuttack about a Guru (Hindu teacher) who had 
once professed Christ, but subsequently abandoned 
the Christian community, who nevertheless used 
to delight in circulating Christian tracts. On one 
occasion when spending the night with one of his 
disciples north of Buddruck, he, as was his 
custom, commenced talking about Christ. " Why, 



126 INDIA. 

that is nothing to me; it is all in the Hindu 
Shasters/' said his disciple. " No, no," said the 
Guru, "you are mistaken — Christ's history is only 
to be found in the Bible." " Well," was the reply, 
" I have a copy of the Shaster, which belonged to 
my father and will show it to you." He soon 
appeared with an ancient looking, much-used copy 
of '* The Immortal History of Christ," written on 
palm leaf This was a copy of a Christian book 
which had probably been in the family fifty years. 
{d) The colonel of the regiment at Tinnnevelly 
told Dr. Sargent, one of the missionaries, that in 
his former regiment some time ago the cash 
keeper, or vakeel of the regiment — a Hindu — was 
dying, when he sent for the munshi (the teacher) 
of the regiment, a Mohammadan of very superior 
education, but with whom the vakeel had hardly 
ever passed a word in his life. The munshi came, 
and the dying man said : " I have sent for you in 
this emergency to ask you one question in confi- 
dence. Do you think the Christian religion true ?" 
"Yes," replied the munshi, "I do." " And so do 



INDIA. 1 27 

I," rejoined the vakeel, and shortly after expired. 
Dr. Sargent gives other instances, and concludes 
with this paragraph : " There are many others 
whose convictions are so far on the side of Chris- 
tianity that if it were not for the ties of family and 
caste, Hinduism would soon lose many of its best 
men. A native gentleman, a Tahsildar, died 
lately in the town of Tinnevelly ; we were long 
familiar friends ; I had frequently commended the 
gospel to him, but he was so surrounded by the 
influences of heathenism, being at one time trustee 
of the great Tinnevelly pagoda, and member of 
the board for temple property generally in 
the district, that I never seemed to make any 
strong impression on him. In his dying moments 
he called his son and told him that he should send 
a donation to Dr. Sargent 'as an offering to 
Jesus.' " 

(e) The Baptist missionaries in Southern Orissa 
in 1881 sent native preachers into a region which 
missionaries had never visited. They were met 
by a man who asked for " The Jewel Mine," a book 



128 INDIA. 

which has led many to Christ They asked how he 
knew about it. He told the following story : — 

"About two years ago my father put a quantity 
of merchandise upon his bullocks' backs, and 
went on a three days' journey into the district to 
attend a market. While there he met a friend of 
his from another village from the opposite direc- 
tion. This friend said to him, ' I have three little 
books teaching a new religion.' He showed them 
to my father, and my father asked him to give 
him one, and he did, and that was the book. 
When he got home he put away his bullocks, and 
washed his feet, and sat down to read his book, 
and that book perfectly bewitched my father. In 
a few days he had lost his appetite, and as he read 
the book we noticed great big tears trickling down 
his cheeks, and he became altogether a changed 
man, his face looked so sorrowful and sad. We 
thought father was bewitched by that book, and 
we must burn the book and mix the ashes in water 
and give it to him to drink, to take the witches 
out of him ; but he guarded the book, and we 



INDIA. 129 

could not get at it. As he read, sirs, a still more 
wonderful change came over him : his tears dried 
up, his face became happy, and his appetite 
returned, and he took food as usual. But he 
would not go to the idol temple any more, and he 
would not have anything more to do with Hindu- 
ism or the Hindu religion. Well, sirs, that father 
died a year ago ; but when he was dying the 
Brahmins came and stood about the door and 
wanted to come in and get their presents, but 
father waved them away with his hand, and said, 
* No Brahmins are needed here — I need not your 
help,' and he would not allow a Brahmin to set 
foot inside his honse. Then, when we saw the 
end was approaching, my mother, my brothers, 
and myself, gathered around and said, ' Father, 
you are dying — you are dying ; do call on 
Krishnu, for you are dying.* He looked up with 
a pleasant smile and said, ' My boy, I have a better 
name than that — the name of Jesus Christ the 
Redeemer of the world, of whom I read in my 
little book; that is a better name than Krishnu.' 



130 INDIA. . 

And my father died, sirs, with the name of Jesus 
Christ on his lips." 

Then among those whom the missionaries are 
teaching there are many who believe, yet are not 
numbered with the believers. How touching the 
account of a dying girl in a Calcutta zenana, who 
gave up her babe, asked for water, and when it 
was brought, crowning herself by putting the open 
Bible across her head, baptized herself and died, 
committing her soul to Him to whom alone, with- 
out oJergy or congregation, she had thus dedicated 
her departing spirit. 

{U) Just while we write there comes to us the 
following in the Calcutta Tract Society's Report: 

*'When out itinerating last March, a young man 
came to the tent who, in the course of conversa- 
tion, said that his father was a worshipper of 
Jesus Christ and preached against caste. As no 
Christians live near, and as I was under the 
impression that the gospel had never before been 
preached in that part, I was deeply interested, and 
in the afternoon went to see him. He! lives in a 



INDIA. 131 

village on the bank of the Jellinghee. I found 
him to be a man of striking appearance and of 
great intelligence. His answers to my questions 
showed that he had a fair knowledge of Christian 
doctrine. He said that it was true that he had 
given up idolatry, disregarded caste, and looked to 
Ghrist for salvation. His account was, that some 
twenty-five years ago a missionary going down the 
river in a boat gave him thirteen tracts. By read- 
ing them he had become enlightened. He had no 
communication with Christians since that time. . 
I am sorry to say that he does not seem willing to 
come forward for baptism. When I pressed the 
duty upon him last July, his answer was — 
* I have been alone in my opinion so many years, 
that I shall now remain solitary to the end of my 
days.' But whether he be baptized or not, he is a 
witness for the truth and proof of the good that 
may be done by gospel tracts." 

Many such cases are known to the missionaries. 
How many more are known to the Master who 
seeth in secret ? 



132 INDIA. 

ftuasi- Christian Communities. — {a) Sir 

Bartle Frere, speaking of India, says : " Mission- 
aries and others are frequently startled by 
disscovering persons, and even communities, who 
have hardly ever seen, and perhaps never heard an 
ordained missionary, but have, nevertheless, made 
considerable progress in Christian knowledge. 

" In one instance, which I know was carefully 
investigated, all the inhabitants of a remote village 
in the Deccan had abjured idolatry and caste, 
removed from their temples the idols which had 
been worshipped there time out of mind, and 
agreed to profess a form of Christianity which 
they had deduced for themselves from a careful 
perusal of a single Gospel, and a few tracts. 
These books had not been given by any mission- 
ary but had been left with some clothes and other 
cast-off property by a merchant, whose name even 
had been forgotten, and who, as far as could be 
ascertained, had never spoken of Christianity to his 
servant, to whom he gave, at parting these things, 
with others of which he had no further record." 



INDIA. 133 

(b) Rev. E. S. Hume of Bombay and of the 
American Board's Marathi Mission, in 1880 gave 
an account of a Christian community discovered 
by him at the town of Lalitpur, a place of about 
10,000 inhabitants, in the southern part of the 
Northwestern Provinces, about 250 miles west of 
Allahabad. It seems that at Khirya, a village 
near Lalitpur, there was a family, four members of 
which had lived a good deal in Bombay, and that 
three of the brothers were members of our 
mission church in that city. For five years past 
they have told Mr. Hume that a large number of 
their friends and neighbors, some of them in vil- 
lages even forty miles away, were Christians, and 
had asked for a preacher or teacher. These 
brothers had often urged Mr. Hume to visit their 
home, and though it was a great distance from his 
field of labor, he determined to accept their 
invitation. There were no missionaries in that 
whole region, save two of the Swedish Society, 
who had not been connected at all with this move- 
ment. From Lalitpur Mr. Hume wrote: "This 



1 34 INDIA. 

work has been going on here unknown to any one 
in all this region. Perhaps there may be many 
places where the seed is secretly growing. 
It must, however, become known some time, and 
when that time does come, there will be great 
rejoicing. Since writing the above, I have learned 
that these people gave up their old heathen cus- 
tom of burning the dead some eight years ago. 
Since then they have been known and regarded as 
Christians." 

{c) In Eastern Bengal the missionaries found 
forty people who had been statedly meeting for 
prayer and reading of the Christian Scriptures, 
No missionary was there. Nobody outside of 
that village knew of these doings. They did not 
know themselves the full import of them. 
A Brahman teacher had got a Bible and a Church 
of England prayer book, and had studied them, 
and told some of his neighbors. They had, when 
found, a native Christian pastor and professed 
themselves Christians. 

(d) At Hoshiyarpoor, thirty bare headed fakirs ^ 



INDIA. 135 

celibate, living on alms, and poor of course, were 
discovered, with Jesus Christ for their ideal fakir. 
Saying that he was an incarnate God, that he was 
poor, self denying, and died a painful death. They 
were going about with the seventh chapter of 
Matthew on their lips, as their "Shorter Cate- 
chism." Two of these men have since been 
baptised, but they go on in their old garb, 
depending on Providence for support, witnessing 
for Christ in their old tracks. 

(e) An American Presbyterian Missionary, of 
the extreme North-west India, stopped in front of 
a shop. A cloth merchant stopped and listened. 
He had copies of the New Testament at home, 
and though he could not read it, a boy could, and 
did to two or three besides this man, who said he 
had met with no Shaster like it. He believed in 
Christ. 

(/) Rev. Mr. Kellogg, Presbyterian, wrote of 
an itinerating tour taken with the venerable Mr. 
Ullman, one of the most experienced missionaries. 
They went a few years since into a remote part of 



136 INDIA. 

a native province, where the following state of 
things was discovered : ''When we got to Jhansi, 
we found that the gospel had been already 
preached there, and in all the country round about, 
by a native Christian brother, Isai Das, a Brah- 
min, baptised fifteen years ago, by Rev. Gopi Nath 
Nandy of Futtehpore. For three years past he has 
labored faithfully in Jhansi and the country round- 
about, itinerating in all directions a hundred miles 
or more. And what is the most encouraging 
thing about this work is, in all this he has been 
entirely independent of any salary, laboring with 
his own hands, and thus supporting himself and 
paying the expenses of his own work, except, 
indeed, as some of the English residents of 
Jhansi, who all bear emphatic testimony to his 
zeal and faithfulness, have assisted him by volun- 
tary contributions. As the fruit of his labor, not 
only has the word of God been preached through- 
out all Bundelkhund, but he has also baptised 
twenty-eight persons. Most of these converts are 
much scattered, one, two, or three in a village, so 



INDIA. 137 

that any organization has been impossible. But 
in one village, in the native state of Gwalior, some 
fifty miles north-west of Jhansi, he has baptised 
ten persons. Of these, one is a Brahmin, with an 
ordinary Hindu education ; the rest are illiterate 
villagers. In this case, Isai Das went to work, as 
I conceive^ exactly on the apostolic model. He 
told this Brahmin, Kasi Ram, whom they all 
respected, that he must take the charge of the 
church, to advise and instruct them as far as he 
was able ; so they all gather every evening and on 
the Sabbath day, when Kasi Ram reads the New 
Testament, sings Christian Bhajans, and prays 
with them. None of their own houses being 
suitable for the purpose, Isai Das told them they 
must build a church, to which every one must 
contribute something. This they cheerfully did, 
raising Rs. 5, to which Isai Das, acting as a Board 
of Church erection, added Rs. 5, and Antri 
rejoiced in a church which cost Rs. 10 (i^S-) 
Their music is Jtill very primitive, in strictly 
native style. Isai Das had access to every native 



13^ INDIA. 

Raja in that region of India except Sindhia. of 
Gwalior, and was always welcomed by them. 

(g) The Methodists of Moradabad found a 
large community in the outlying villages who 
called themselves Christians, though they could 
give no account of the origin of the title amongst 
them, and were worshipping idols like their Hindu 
neighbors. They wished to have their children 
taught true Christianity. 

(k) The Presbyterian missionaries of Futtehgarh 
found in the Saadh a class of people whom no 
missionary had visited, thrown off from the Brah- 
manic community, following a leader who was 
instructing them in a religion which was neither 
Hindu, Moslem, nor Christian, but was more 
Christian than anything else. They sought and 
readily accepted Christian instruction. 

(/) A Baptist missionary in East Bengal, 
reports the discovery of a sect as follows : Thirty 
years ago to Sree Nath, in Bikrampoor, was 
revealed the three names of Father, Son and Holy 
Spirit. By the help of the Holy Spirit, he did 



INDIA. 139 

many wonderful works, giving sight to the blind 
and delivering people from various diseases. 
When Sree Nath's hour of death approached, he 
gave this command to his own disciples : " Keep 
in love and friendship with the missionaries and 
Christians, because they and we are the disciples 
of one Guru." These Satya Gooroos, as they call 
themselves, are in the habit of reading the Bible 
and praying together and confessing Christ to the 
Incarnate God. "We believe in Him. By our 
prayers many diseased people get deliverance and 
have health restored. If any onie among us is guilty 
of fornication or other grievous sin, we put him out 
of our congregation, according to the Apostle Paul's 
command, but if he forsake his sin, we receive him 
again according to the apostle's instructions." 

We have numerous accounts of like Semi- 
Christian communities in almost all parts of India. 
" Who taught you about Christ?" asked a mission- 
ary of an intelligent woman amongst the Kols in 
Central India. "Who?" was the reply, "Why 
this teaching is all over the country." 



I40 INDIA. 

K'on-Christian Anticipation of tlie Tri- 
umph of Christianity in India. —Amongst 
noteworthy impressions made on the native mind 
is that of a general expectancy of the gen- 
eral prevalence of Christianity, which is found 
in widely separated parts of the country, in 
communities disconnected from each other, and 
often in places remote from the Christian mis- 
sionary, and from all traceable connection with 
direct Christian effort. These indicate that 
Christianity has made a deep and widespread 
impression on the native mind, and are in turn an 
element of power in its future progress. 

The brilliant conquests of Cortez in Mexico were 
largely attributable to the religious anticipations 
of the people that the god who was to inaugurate 
the Golden Age was to come from the east, and 
the force of the Aztec was abated by the thought 
that the Spaniard, with his strange appearance and 
appliances, might possibly be his anticipated 
Benefactor. Similar prophetic myths among the 
Karens, had created expectancy of spiritual and 



INDIA. 141 

temporal help, which has proved to be a great factor 
in their conversion. It is something therefore — it 
is much — that this profound, semi prophetic im- 
pression has been so generally made on the non- 
Christian natives, of the irresistible progress of 
Christianity in their land. 

In no other country are there so many con- 
vinced of the truths of Christianity who are 
counted with the opponents of it, and in no other 
heathen country is there so general anticipation of 
the ultimate triumph of Christianity over other 
forms of faith. 

"Do not take so much trouble ; our folks will 
soon become Christian even if left to themselves," 
said a Hindu woman in the zenanas of Calcutta to 
Miss Britain. ''Only have a little patience, and 
all the Hindus will become Christians," said 
another Hindu woman to Mrs. Page. 

*' We believe we speak the simple truth," said the 
Lucknow Witness, " when we say that millions of 
natives are firmly convinced of this. We have 
found it an accepted belief in the most remote 



■5^1 



14^. INDIA. 

mountain hamlets where no European had ever 
penetrated, and we find it received as an inevitable 
event of the near future in every city and town of 
the plains." 

Rev. Dr. Waugh of Lucknow says : "A deep and 
wide-spread conviction seems to prevail, not only 
in cities, but also in the country places, among the 
villagers, and, indeed, throughout all classes, that 
a day of overthrowing of the old religions and 
effete faiths, of the breaking- up of old forms, is at 
hand. The common people speak of the coming 
day of overturning, and seem not dismayed at its 
approach, but announce themselves as ready to 
join in the van, indeed are only awaiting its 
coming to break away from their present thral- 
dom and bonds of caste." 

A company of educated natives, none of whom 
were Christians, met five Sundays in succes- 
sion in Calcutta to discuss the question, " Is 
it likely that Christianity will become the religion 
of India ? " At the close, a vote was taken, 
and it was unanimously declared in the affirm- 



INDIA. 143 

ative. They seemed thunderstruck with the 
result of their own deliberations. One of the 
gentlemen, a head-master of a government school, 
got up and said, "Then what are we here for?" 
This was echoed by all present. They broke up, 
and never met more. 

Dr. Tracy of the Madras Mission, noting the 
changes after forty years, testified to " the prevail- 
ing feeling among intelligent natives that Chris- 
tianity is ere long to become the prevailing 
religion of the country." 

A thousand miles or more from Dr. Tracy's 
field. Rev. Mr. Sheriff of the Lahore Divinity 
College writes : " It is curious to notice how 
thoroughly possessed the Muhammadans of the 
Punjab seem to be becoming with the expectation 
of the triumph of Christianity. One man actually 
urged this as a proof of Muhammad's inspiration 
and power of predicting, as there is a tradition 
that he foretold that Christianity would prevail 
throughout the world." 

Miss Blackmar of Lucknow, tells of a Hindu 



144 INDIA. 

gathering she witnessed in a place crowded with 
temples and other tokens of idolatry. The native 
Gospel preacher, hovvev^er, as he addressed the 
audience on this occasion under the open sky, was 
heard by a large number outside the company of 
believers, who, at the close, acknowledged that, 
though they would not yet call themselves 
Christians, the time was drawing near when all 
India would yield. Then, before separating, 
following their custom, this crowd of Hindus 
raised a shout of " Victory ! " — not to the gods, as 
usual — but to Jesus. *'Vzsii MassiJi ki ja!'' — 
" Victory to Jesus the Saviour ! " 

It is an amusing, yet not uninstructive illustra- 
tion of the percolation of Christian thought 
amongst the masses of the people, and of the way 
in which they are coming to keep unconscious 
step in the quick-march of Christian conquest' 
that when a few years since, the hereditary priests 
of the Mysore Raja, were going to the palace to 
perform their sacred duties, with Brahmins heading 
the procession and respectable citizens composing 



INDIA. 145 

the train, there was a band of music at the head 
of the procession playing, *' Dare to be a Daniel !" 

Dr. Mullens, than whom- no man was more 
competent to speak on this subject, very signifi- 
cantly affirmed that " the greatest fruit of all 
missionary labor in India is in the mighty changes 
produced in the knowledge and convictions of the 
people at large." 

The Rev. James Smith, (Baptist), of Delhi, 
states that "in India there are thousands and tens 
of thousands who have never joined the Christian 
Church, but who are Christians in heart. There 
came to me the other day a well educated man, 
one of good position in Delhi. He was a man, 
too, in a Government college, and he is reading 
for a degree. He said, 'I am a Christian. I 
believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no life 
that has ever been depicted on earth that can 
compare with the lovely, perfect life of Christ. 
But,' he said, * I have got an aged father and a 
mother. We form part of a large family. By 
remaining where I am I can affect the whole. 



14^ INDIA. 

I can go on teaching the whole. Your zenana 
ladies are teaching my wife ; she has some 
considerable influence over my mother. I do 
believe in Christ, but I cannot be baptised, for if I 
was I should break up my family and bring the 
grey hairs of my father and mother in sorrow to 
the grave.* There are thousands of these. And 
so it is wherever you go. Go into the railway 
carriages and there you hear men talking about 
Christianity. Travel through the lonely parts of 
the land, and men talk about Christianity. It has 
become a general subject of conversation ; and the 
spread of truth has been far greater than any of 
the statistics for a moment explains." 

Bishop Marvin of the M. E. church, south, 
visiting Ceylon, observed the same drift of thought 
there. He wrote : 

"I am told that it is not an unusual thing for a 
man to say, 'We cannot embrace your religion, 
but our children will.* Many of them seem to 
feel the power of Christ's coming. They see that 
the advance of Christian ideas is irresistible. Their 



INDIA. 147 

minds are adjusted to the triumph of Christ as to 
a destiny, and this feeling facilitates Christian 
work, and must hasten the result." 

Mass Movements. — We have elsewhere shown 
the tendency amongst the people of India to 
move in mass. The convictions of one man 
before they lead him to action, will have prob- 
ably become the convictions of a score or a 
hundred other men. The grand tabulated results 
to which we have referred, have nearly all been 
reached through just such mass movements, and 
indicate that the other and wider general prepara- 
tion over the country at large, may result in yet 
more extensive simultaneous movements of the 
people toward Christianity. It was thus, the 
Karens moved toward Christ. Mr. Vinton labored 
but six years among them, and yet he saw between 
eight and nine thousand Karens worshipping in 
Christian assemblies. 

Rev. Mr. Boerrusun, a Norwegian missionary 
laboring among the aboriginal tribes north-west of 
Calcutta, known as the Santals, a (ew years ago 



148 INDIA. 

wrote: "The Lord is doing wonders here. During 
the last few weeks I have baptised upward of five ' 
hundred persons, and every day from ten to a 
hundred fresh candidates present themselves, and 
are eager to be taught further in the truths of the 
gospel. Every one of them is an evangelist, 
doing all he can to get some one of his heathen 
brethren to share the blessing he has himself 
experienced. Many women come as far as 
twenty to thirty miles, and the whole land of the 
Santals seems to be under the mighty influence." 
This same missionary, according to the Lucknow 
Witness, in four months of 1872 baptised no less 
than fourteen hundred persons, converts from 
heathendom. 

A hundred thousand Shanars, a devil worship- 
ing tribe in South India, have accepted Chris- 
tianity, and their "revival" meetings have been 
attended with remarkable physical phenomena, 
such as whip-like cracking of the hair, and violent 
jerkings, similar to those witnessed in earlier 
times at camp-meeting in Kentucky and elsewhere. 



INDIA. 149 

Rev. John Thomas Tucker, of the English Church 
Missionary Society, saw these same Shanars 
"destroy with their own hands, fifty four devil 
temples, and build sixty- four houses for Christian 
worship." 

These results came suddenly, but not till after 
twenty-five years of patient and apparently hope- 
less preparatory toil. The missionaries among 
the Santals labored for five years before they saw 
their first convert, and the wide and powerful 
communal awakening and conversion was a sur- 
prise to these missionaries themselves. Thus was 
it with the Baptist missionaries among the 
Teloogoos, in December, 1870, when '* in the 
midst of harvest, men and women turned out by 
hundreds to hear about Jesus." 

Thus was it too at Ongole. Look at the fol- 
lowing: 

1. In 1853 a missionary and his native preacher 
visited Ongole, 77 miles north of Nellore, and 
were reviled and stoned. 

2. In 1865, twelve years after, that missionary 



ISO INDIA, 

and another visited Ongole, and the second 
missionary remained and became resident. 

3. In 1867 a church was organized at Ongole 
with eight members. 

4. On March 15, iSyS, the little church num- 
bered no, and the missionary says that he was 
not baptising anybody, though 1500 persons from 
near and far requested baptism. 

5. On June 16, 1878, after careful examina- 
tions conducted through months, Mr. Clough, the 
resident missionary, and his native assistants 
commenced baptising the persons clamoring for it 
One day they baptised two thousand, two hundred 
and twenty-two (2222). 

6. Between July 6th and i6th they baptised 
eight thousand, six hundred and ninety-one! 

Tinnevelly, in the extreme southern part of 
India, was the scene of a like marvellous move- 
ment. After twenty years of preparatory toil, in 
seven months more than sixteen thousand souls 
placed themselves voluntarily under instruction with 
a view to Christian baptistn / 



INDIA. 151 

Dr. Caldwell, made a bishop, after fourteen 
years in India, reported : " We are at our wit's 
end for the means of instructing all these people. 
We have now congregations, larger or smaller, in 
150 villages, in which not even a single Christian 
resided before." 

In the Arcot mission, in a like brief period, 
6000 souls renounced their idols and finally 
accepted Christianity, and the missionaries wrote : 
" Sixty different villages have sent forth on an 
average 100 persons to profess a willingness to 
follow Christ." In these two districts then, within 
a short period, 22,oco additions were made to the 
Christian community ! What wonder, when this 
was told to an aged saint, he said, ** Glory be to 
the Father! Glory be to the Son ! Glory be to 
the Holy Ghost!" 

We concede the difference between these rude 
tribes and the burnished Brahmanism and bannered 
Islamism of the Gangetic valley — for nine- tenths 
of the Christian converts are from the aboriginal 
stock — but we do not yield the logical force of 



152 INDIA. 

the precedent. Nor let it be forgotten that these 
races are, after all, the back-bone of the country. 
The populations everywhere move in mass if they 
move at all, the preparatory efforts have been 
wide-spread amongst other races where as yet we 
have not seen this communal action, yet what we 
have seen, more than suggests that like results are 
possible in other parts of India ; that some day — 
perhaps not a distant day — all over India, there 
may be a wide spread Christian awakening. The 
up-rising may come with a rush, and there may 
not be Christians enough to show inquirers the 
way. 

A native Hindu woman in Delhi said to one of 
the Baptist missionary ladies, "Are there not 
thousands waiting for one another ? " 

It is not surprising that so thoughtful a man as 
Sir John Lawrence, Viceroy and Governor General 
of all India, should have written in 1870: "It 
seems to me that, year by year, and cycle by 
cycle, the influence of these missionaries must 
increase ; and that in God's good will, the time 



INDIA. 153 

may be expected to come, when large masses of 
the people, having lost all faith in their own, and 
feeling the want of a religion which is pure and 
true and holy, will be converted and profess the 
Christian religion ; and, having professed it, live 
in accordance with its precepts." 

Sir Charles Trevelyan, for twelve years an 
Indian official, is quoted in the life of Dr. Duff as 
having given the following opinion : " Many 
persons mistake the way in which the conversion 
of India will be brought about. I believe 
it will take place at last wholesale, just as 
our own ancestors were converted. The country 
will have Christian instruction infused into it in 
every way ; by direct missionary education, and 
indirectly through books of various kinds, through 
the public papers, through conversation with 
Europeans, and in all the conceivable ways in 
which knowledge is communicated. Then at last, 
when society is completely saturated with Christian 
knowledge, and public opinion has taken a decided 
turn that way, they will come over by thousands." 



154 INDIA. 

Native Christian Leaders. — Though the 
Christians are only a handful of people compared 
with their heathen neighbors, a rapid change is 
going on in their relative position and influence in 
society and the government. Should they advance 
proportionately in the future as in the past, in the 
course of two or three generations they would 
take the intellectual lead of India. 

The Bangalore Conference sard : " Primary 
education has made great progress amongst the 
native Christians, every year scores of both sexes 
pass the Government Teachers'- Certificate- Exam- 
inations and take a large share in the education 
of the masses, not only in Mission, but in 
Government, Municipal and Local Fund schools.'* 

Out of 140 students graduated by the Govern- 
ment college to B. A. degree in 1878, 14 were 
Christians. 

Christian students are not relatively deficient in 
their intellectual vigor. In the University exam- 
ination of 1882-3 t^s per-cent. of ' 'Christian 
graduates was in excess of that of the Brahmans 



COMPARATIVE GROWTH OF THE NATIVE 

CHRIISTIAN COMMUNITY, IN FIFTY 

YEARS. 



1870 



I860 



1850 



1830 



10 




Si 


^ 






tx 


•^ 


9 


i> 


w^ 


91 



The relative numbers of Brahmans, non Brahman 
Hindus, Muhammadans, and Christians, who 
passed the various examinations of the Madras 
University, is very striking. The four classes 
stood respectively as follows: 2,702, 1,303, 106^ 
and 332. The percentage of passes among the 
Christians was 45.4, and among the ]5rahmans 
only 35.04, while the other two classes were still 
lower. In the First Arts' examination the Christian 
average was 59.6, the Brahman 34.02, and other 
Hindus 32.1. In the B. A. examination the 
Christians held their advanced position, while the 
Brahmans gained largely. 

The future wives and mothers will hold power- 
ful sway over India's mind and heart. In this 
special department Christianity is making long 
strides on Hinduism by the education of females. 
The census of the Northwest Provinces in 1880 
showed the proportion of males and females "able 
to read and write" to be 43 to i. Distributed 
amongst the people according to religions, how- 
ever, it stands thus : Amongst Hindus able to read 



156 INDIA. 

and write, there was I female to 79 males ; amongst 
Muhammadans i to 55 ; amongst Christians I to 2. 

The Theological Seminary of the Karens has 
been left in charge of natives and suffered no loss. 
In the Jaffna College of Ceylon, and in the Tamil 
seats of learning, natives have been successful 
professors. In the great Conferences of Christian 
Missionaries at Allahabad, Calcutta and elsewhere 
Christian converts from various castes of Hindus 
and Muhammadans, sat side by side as peers with 
graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, 
Williams and Middletown Universities. 

We must remember the possible influence of a 
great leader over such peoples as are in India, 
Ko Thau Byu and Quala in Burmah were mighty 
leaders of their people. What may not some 
native leader, competent for the emergency, do in 
directing a general movement toward Christianity? 
It is always possible that from among the mul- 
titudes thronging the bazars, dreaming in the 
jungle, pondering philosophical problems, some 
one may be arrested by a tract, instructed in the 



INDIA. 157 

school, trained in the seminary, with a head like 
that of Loyola, and a heart like that superstitious 
monk of Wurtemburg-, who redeemed half Europe, 
and, dying, bequeathed to the world a Protestant 
Church and an open Bible — who, we say, with a 
head like that of Loyola, and a heart stirred like 
that of Luther, subtle with all the subtlety of the 
East, wise with all the practical knowledge of the 
West, shall be to his people what no foreign 
evangelist can ever become, the leader of a grand 
Christian reformation, revival, or awakening, 
which shall sweep from the Himalayas to Cape 
Comorin, and from sea to sea. One such Chris- 
tianized Hindu might revolutionize all India. One 
such converted Moslem might reorganize half 
of Asia. 

To say nothing of the supernatural force 
promised in prophecy, and looking only to human 
means, it has been asked. If Muhammad were 
possible, why is this a dream? Such is the 
combination of disturbing forces in India that one 
Turanian Peter the Plermit, might break in pieces 



all Hindu systems, one Bengali Chrysostom might 
move and re- mold the mighty masses of the 
Ganges, one Tamil Whitfield might sweep South- 
ern India with revival flame, one Indian Wesley 
might inaugurate on the plains of Hindustan a 
numerically mightier Methodism than Europe or 
America has yet seen. 

Woman's Work. — It should be borne in mind 
that the results tabulated have been reached, while 
our agencies have been limited to one half of the 
population. The women have not until recently 
been directly accessible to missionary agents. 
Women are the conservators of religion whether 
the faith be a good or a bad one. India women 
have been great conservators of the religions 
of the land. 

The Census Report of the Madras Presidency 
contains the following : 

" There can be no reasonable doubt but that 
the religious fairs and festivals of the country are 
maintained mainly through the influence of Hindu 
women. Their ordinary life is dull and cheerless, 



INDIA. 159 

and the pilgrimage is looked forward to, for 
months, as the only relief from the routine of 
home duties." They restrain the men from adopt- 
ing Christianity, and bitterly antagonize them 
when they do. 

They do not lack in quality of character, and 
clearly the element of "grit" is not wanting. 

Widow-burning was often purely voluntary and 
was generally esteemed heroic. In the Bengal 

Presidency alone in the year 1 8 17 no less than 700 
widows are said to have been burned alive, and 
Sir Bartle Frere declares that "even to this day 
widows would be quite ready to burn themselves 
on the funeral pyres of their husbands were they 
not prevented by the strong hand of the British 
Government." He argues that there is a " great 
future for the women of India when properly 
educated." The rapid development of the agen- 
cies for reaching these women, within a decade, is 
almost phenomenal. 



l60 INDIA. 

MIS CELL ANE O US RESUL TS. 

Christian civilization has made powerful inroads 
on heathenism in India. The late Keshub Chunder 
Sen put it well in his " India asks — Who is 
Christ ? " when he said : " Is not a new and agres- 
sive civilization winning its way day after day, and 
year after year, into the very heart and soul of the 
people? Are not Christian ideas and institutions 
taking their root on all sides in the soil of India." 

The extraordinary resemblance between the 
decline and fall of Paganism in the Roman Em- 
pire, and what has been going on for a century, 
and is still going on in India, has been repeatedly 
pointed out. 

Reforms. — The India of to-day is not the 
India of the books. The very air is full of rest- 
lessness and change. European education is 
breaking up old systems ; English legislators are 
steadily teaching the equality of man ; Western 
medical science is displacing muttered incantations; 
fifty millions of Hindus have defied caste and 



INDIA. l6l 

tried the railway ; the penny post and telegraph 
are exposing idolatrous shams. Eighty years ago, 
infants were publicly thrown into the Ganges; 
while young men and maidens decked with flowers 
were slain in Hindu temples, or hacked to pieces 
and distributed as a sacrifice to the god of the soil, 
and lepers were buried alive. 

Christianity more and more pervades the Gov- 
ernment itself In 1812 the Indian Government 
ordered two missionaries expelled from the 
country, and later three others. An early Gover- 
nor General said : *' The man who would be mad 
enough to think of teaching religion to the natives 
would shoot a pistol into a magazine of gunpow- 
der." But in 1872 the Government of India said 
inits report to the British Parliament that it could 
not " but acknowledge the great obligation " under 
which it was laid by the benevolent exertions of 
the Missionaries. 

Widow burning is a very old custom in India. 
It went on till Lord William Bentick said, *' You 
shall not burn any more women." When Sir 



l62 INDIA. 

Charles Napier was in Scinde a group of natives 
were preparing to burn a widow, and he sent them 
word that he would not allow the sacrifice. " The 
British Government," said they, " promised that 
they would not interfere with our sacred religious 
customs, and we don't interfere with yours." 
"Very well," said Sir Charles, "as it is your 
custom to burn widows, go and prepare the 
funeral pile and burn the woman ; I won't prevent 
you ; but my country has a custom ; and when 
men burn women alive, we hang the men and 
confiscate their property ; and while you are pre- 
paring the funeral pile I will get the gibbets ready 
and hang every Brahman concerned in the 
burning." 

When Sir John Lawrence was making the land 
settlements of the Punjab, as each man took his 
lease he made him touch the pen and swear aloud 
the triologue of the British Government : 

" I. Thou shalt not burn thy widows. 

2. Thou shalt not kill thy daughters. 

3. Thou shalt not bury alive thy lepers." 



INDIA. 163 

"Come to the meeting that is to be held" at 
such a time, said Keshub Chunder Sen to Rev. 
Dr. Murray Mitchell in Calcutta in 1883, "and 
you will hear me utter sentiments for which I 
should have been hissed off the platform five 
years ago." 

Forty years ago no respectable Hindu family 
would have permitted a daughter of the house to 
approach any Mission premises. But Rev. E. E. 
Jenkins said in 1877, "The other day 113 caste 
girls were brought into the mission house to see 
me, and to be examined in the New Testament ; 
14 of them were young Brahman ladies." And 
this was in a comparatively isolated town remote 
from the tidal wave of great changes which has 
swept the great cities. 

These Reforms are of Distinctively Chris- 
tian Origin. — Lest we be thought more advocate 
than judge in ascribing these reforms to Christi- 
tianity, we introduce three wholly dissimilar 
witnesses to our view : 

The Missionaries themselves have instigated 



164 INDIA. 

many of these reforms, and Christianity has forced 
an advance through a variety of agencies. 

" The movement of reh'gious reforms," said Max 
MuUer in a lecture in Westminster Abbey, "which 
is now going on [in India] appears to my mind 
the most momentous in this momentous country. 
If our Missionaries feel constrained to repudiate 
it as their own work, history will be more just to 
them than they themselves. And if not as the work 
of Christian Missionaries, it will be recognized 
hereafter as the work of those mission Christians 
who have lived in India, as examples of a true 
Christian life, who have approached the natives in 
a truly missionary spirit, in the spirit of truth and 
love ; whose bright presence has thawed the ice, 
and brought out beneath it the old soil ready to 
blossom into new life." 

Sir Bartle Frere, after ruling millions of natives 
in India, expressed the same opinion in his lecture 
July 9, 1872, and added : 

" It is not I alone who think so. You cannot 
gain the confidence of any thoughtful, honest, 



INDIA. 165 

educated Hindu, without finding out that this is 
his conviction. He may put subsidiary causes 
in the foreground. Our superior military strength 
— our freedom of political and social thought and 
action — our railways and other means of rapid 
intercommunication — our free press — our all- 
embracing literature and open education — our 
uniform laws, — these and many other agencies will 
occur to him as the most efficient solvents of his 
ancient social system. But he instinctively feels 
what we ourselves are sometimes slow to perceive 
— that all these institutions and agencies are 
somehow the products and offshoots of our 
religion — that Christianity is logically and legiti- 
mately the foundation, the well-spring of influence 
under a hundred shapes, moral and material." 

The eloquent and able Hindu reformer. Ram 
Chunder Sen, in his remarkable lecture on " India 
asks — Who is Christ ?" testifies thus : 

" It is not the British Government but Chris- 
tianity that is forcing these changes. * * 
You are mistaken if you think it is the ability of 



l66 INDIA. 

Lord Lytton in the Cabinet, or the military genius 
of Sir Frederick Haines in the field, that rules 
India. It is not politics ; it is not diplomacy that 
has laid a firm hold of the Indian heart. It is not 
the glittering bayonet, nor the fiery cannon that 
influences us. * * Christ rules British 

India and not the British Government." 

It is not surprising therefore that Max Muller 
should have said : " From what I know of the 
Hindus, they seem to me riper for Christianity 
than any nation that ever accepted the Gospel." 

Hinduism is Disintegrating. — Hinduism 
stands helpless before these changes. As a re- 
ligious system it has no sacred fire that can be 
fanned into flame to rekindle the " beliefs that go 
flickering out on every side." 

It seems as if Hinduism would die in this new 
element, says Sir Alfred Lyell, " as quickly as a 
net full of fish lifted up out of the water." 

** The younger men do not much mind caste 
rules ; not more than we can help," said a young 
man to sfn English traveller. " Those who learn 



INDIA. 167 

English," he said "do not believe in idols." The 
head of a native college testified to his belief that 
every one of their students who left them know- 
ing English had ceased to believe in Hinduism. 
Rev. E. W. Parker put the question to a class of 
educated young natives in Calcutta : " How 
many educated young men believe in the Shas- 
tars ? " And the answers came unhesitatingly 
" Not one in a hundred ; " " Not one in a thou- 
sand." 

A native Professor in Bombay in a public meet- 
ing of natives made the following admission : 
" Hinduism is sick unto death. I am fully per- 
suaded it must fall. Still while hope remains let 
us minister to it as best we can." 

The Census Report compiled for the India 
Government in the Madras Presidency, by Sur- 
geon Major Cornish, declares concerning the pop- 
ulation of over thirty millions, occupying this ter- 
ritory of more than 158 square miles: 

"The age of hero deification is already passing 
away. The magnificent temple erected in past 



1 68 INDIA. 

ages in honor of Siva and Vishnu, or their human 
personifications, are slowly succumbing to the de- 
stroying hand of Time. New temples, on a scale 
of grandeur, equal to those of former eras, are 
unknown. The traveller through our southern 
districts will find many examples of noble build- 
ings crumbling into decay, but he will see nothing 
in modern Hindu architecture to call forth his 
admiration, or to impress upon him the convic- 
tion that there is vitality and progress in Hindu- 
ism. The few buildings of the modern class are 
mean in structure and design, and mostly dedicat- 
ed to village deities, whose peculiar claims to the 
worship of the people are unknown beyond the 
immediate neighborhood. * * * * 

"The general decay of Hindu temples through- 
out the country is but a visible sign of the waning 
vitality of the religion itself Among the classes 
already influenced by western ideas, Hinduism is 
practically dead. Neither Deism nor Christianity 
have as yet stepped in to fill the void in the reli- 
gious life of the educated people. The day is 



INDIA. 169 

probably not far distant when a great religious re- 
vival — a shaking of the dry-bones of Hinduism 
— shall occur." 

Brahmoism. — A prominent phase in which 
this disintegration of Hinduism is observed is 
seen in the patch-work of reform which is spoken 
of as Brahmoism. The three epochs of this move- 
ment may be readily grouped around three names. 

1. Ram Mohun Roy was born in Bengal in 1774, 
brought in connection with missionaries, and led 
to examine the Shastars in search of truth. He 
discovered that many of the religious notions and 
practices of the people such as the doctrine of 
transmigration, caste and others were not to be 
found in the oldest original scriptures. He at- 
tempted to reform Hinduism by bringing it to this 
Vedic standard. He was persecuted and driven 
from India to England to escape martydom at the 
hands of his countrymen. He v^as one of 
India's noblest sons. 

2. Babu Debendranath Tagore, eldest son of a 
well known merchant and landholder, abandoned 



I70 INDIA. 

his prospects in business to champion this cause, 
and it passed to its second stage, in which the in- 
fallibih'ty of the Veda itself was doubted, and the 
reform took its stand on intuition. 

3. Babu Keshiib Chimder Sen, born in Calcutta 
in 1832, belonged to a well known Vaidya or 
Medical caste. "Rom in a family of idolaters, train- 
ed in Hindu superstitions and prejudices, at eight 
years ofage he entered the Hindu college inCalcutta 
and continued his English studies up to the first 
class of the Presidency college. He became ac- 
quainted with the Bible, wrote short hymns and 
prayers, and at the age of twenty (1858) joined 
the **Samaj" or "Society" of these reformers. 

The movement now became one of social reform, 
of which female education, the re-marriage of 
» widows and opposition to child-marriage were 
prominent features. 

The older members of the Samaj opposing these 
changes, Keshub Chunder Sen headed a division 
which seceded and organized the Brahma Samaj. 
In 1878 a secession from this Samaj in turn, took 



INDIA. 171 

place, in opposition to the tendency to accept Mr. 
Sen as an infallible authority, combined with ob- 
jections to the constitution of the Society. The 
oldest is known as the Adi Samaj. That headed 
by Mr. Sen is styled the Brahmo Samaj, or now, 
the " New Dispensation." And the third and 
latest is called the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. 

Roughly speaking, the doctrines of these three 
organizations are the same. They reject special 
objective revelation as "impossible." God is a 
Father; happiness comes from fulfilling duty and 
forsaking sin. Punishment follows sin, but it is 
purifying and remedial ; meditation and prayer 
conduce to the same end. They reject all media- 
tion and intercession. 

They differ on questions of social reform, on 
the idea and mission of the movement itself, and 
on church government and organization. 

They profess to renounce superstition, paganism, 
monstrosities and absurdities, abjure atheism and 
materialism. Buddhism and Hinduism ; regard 
Christianity as one of several ways leading to 



1/2 INDIA. 

truth, the Vedas being another, and hold that 
though this truth is nowhere definitely revealed, 
the adherent's mind is a mirror to catch rays of it. 

There is a dreaminess, haziness or mysticism 
about the whole, very attractive to the oriental 
mind. Various opinions of the value of this move- 
ment obtain. Sir Alfred Lyell thinks it likely 
to become the religion of the immediate future 
among the educated classes of Hindus, but that it 
will hardly supplant Hinduism among the masses 
for a long time to come." 

He notes that it *' clearly has a political mean- 
ing, which is this, that the India nation emanci- 
pated from British leading strings should govern 
itself," but thinks this " too far ahead to belong to 
practical politics." 

The question whether this new movement is 
favorable to the reception of Christianity, divides 
those best able to judge of it. To some it seems 
only a rebound of a mind suddenly loosed from 
hoary superstitions ; to others it appears as a half- 
step toward Christianity ; to others still, it is a 



INDIA. 173 

substitute for Christianity, a fresh device of Satan 
which praises Christ as a Saviour and yet accords 
him only patronage among inferior beings, the 
full-blown system being only a mischievous de- 
lusion which fortunately has made no considerable 
progress affecting the community at large, and 
whose defections and divisions will preclude its 
being a great popular movement. 

Muhammadanism is Materially Affected. 

— A similar disturbance and modification of the 
Muhammadan community is observable. In the 
Koran Muhammad recognizes, in more than 150 
passages, the Old and New Testament and 
prophets, eminently ascribing authority to Jesus 
Christ, and claims that himself is the Paraclete 
promised by Jesus. A liberal school of thought- 
ful students among them study the Christian 
Scriptures and evidences, seeking to reconcile the 
two. An authority says : 

" The Muhammadans of the Punjab predict the 
second coming of Christ ; only they think that He 
will establish Islam. They say 'There is no 



174 INDIA. 

Mahdi (deliverer) save Jesus the son of Mary.' 
One Moslem officer said to Mr. Gordon, of the 
Church Missionary Society, *When He comes I 
will lay my turban at His feet;' and taking it off, ; 
he gracefully suited the action to the word. An 
old Sikh stopped Mr. Gordon on the road one day, 
land said: 'When is Christ coming?'" 

This does not mean that Muhammadanism is 
numerically declining in India, for it is not, but it 
does indicate that we have found an entering 
wedge to its thought. 

OPINIONS OF EMINENT LA YMEN 

Lord Lawrence entered India in 1830, at the 
age of 19, in the lowest ranks of the civil service, 
and worked his way to the top, having to deal 
hand to hand with the common people, levying 
taxes, holding courts and ferreting out crimes, till 
it became a proverb amongst them : ''Lord Law- 
rence knows everything^ He knew Sikh and Mos- 



INDIA. 175 

lem and Hindu from Calcutta to Peshawer, and 
boldly declared : 

"I believe, notwithstanding all that the English 
people have done to benefit that country, the 
missionaries have done more than all other agen- 
cies combined." 

Sir Herbert Edwards, in Exeter Hall in 
1866, said : 

" God is forming a new nation in India. 
This is clear to every thoughtful mind. While the 
Hindus are busy pulling down their own religion, 
the Christian church is rising above the horizon. 
Amidst a dense population of 200,000,000 of 
heathen, the little flock of native Christians may 
seem like a speck, but surely it is that little cloud 
out of the sea like a man's hand which tells there 
is to be * a great rain.' Every other faith in India 
is decaying. Christianity alone is beginning to 
run its course. It has taken long to plant, but it 
has now taken root, and by God's grace, will never 
be uprooted. The Christian converts were tested 
by persecution and martyrdom in 1857, and they 



176 INDIA. 

stood the test without apostasy ; and I beh'eve, 
that, if the English were driven out of India to- 
morrow, Christianity would remain and triumph." 

Sir Donald McLeod, Lieut.-Gov. of the Pun- 
jab, said : 

*' In many places an impression prevails 
that the missions have not produced results ade- 
quate to the efforts which have been made ; but I 
trust enough has been said to prove that there is 
no real foundation for this impression, and those 
who hold such opinions know but little of the 
reality." 

Sir Bartle Frere, Gov. of Bombay, said : 

" I speak simply as to matters of experience and 
observation, and not of opinion — just as a Roman 
Prefect might have reported to Trajan or the An- 
tonines ; and I assure you that, whatever you may 
be told to the contrary, the teaching of Chris- 
tianity among 160 millions of civilized, industri- 
ous Hindus and Muhammadans in India, is 
effecting changes, moral, social, and political, 
which for extent and rapidity of effect are far more 



INDIA. 177 

extraordinary than anything you or your fathers 
have witnessed in modern Europe." 

Lord Napier, Governor of Madras in 187 1, 
reports : 

" I have broken the missionary's bread, !• 
have been present at his ministrations, I have wit- 
nessed his teaching, I have seen the beauty of his 
hfe. The benefits of missionary enterprise are felt 
in three directions — in converting, civilizing, and 
teaching the Indian people. i. Conversion. — 
The progress of Christianity is slow, but it is un- 
deniable. Every year sees the area and the num- 
ber slightly increase. 2. Education. — In the 
matter of education, the cooperation of the 
religious societies is of course inestimable to the 
Government and the people. . . Missionary 
agency is, in my judgment, the only agency that 
can at present bring the benefits of teaching home 
to the humblest orders of the population. 3. 6^7^//- 
ization. — It is not easy to over-rate the value in 
this vast empire of a class of Englishmen of pious 
lives and disinterested labors, living and moving 



178 INDIA. 

in the most forsaken places, walking between the 
Government and the people with devotion to both, 
the friends of right, the adversaries of wrong, im- 
partial spectators of good and evil." 

The Indian Government Report to Parlia- 
ment, on the •* The Material and Moral Progress 
of India in 1871-72" contains the following: 

"The labors of the foreign missionaries in India 
assume many forms. Apart from their special 
duties as public preachers and pastors, they con- 
stitute a valuable body of educators ; they contrib- 
ute greatly to the cultivation of the native lan- 
guages and literature, and all who are resident in 
rural districts are appealed to for medical help to 
the sick." * * * Jhe result is too remark- 
able to be overlooked. The missionaries, as a 
body, know the natives of India well ; they have 
prepared hundreds of works, suited both for 
schools and for general circulation, in the fifteen 
most prominent languages of India and in the 
several other dialects ; they have largely stimulated 



INDIA. 179 

the great Increase of the native literature prepared 
in recent years by educated native gentlemen." 

The report furthermore testifies that: "No 
statistics can give a fair view of all that they have 
done. * * The moral tone of their 

preaching is recognized and highly appreciated by 
multitudes who do not follow them as converts." 
They "bring their various moral influences to bear 
upon the country with the greater force because 
they act together with a compactness which is 
but little understood." 

Sir Richard Temple, late Governor of Bom- 
bay, was for nearly 30 years in India, serving in 
every province of the Empire but one, and em- 
ployed in various capacities under all departments 
of the State, being in succession Chief Commis- 
sioner of the Central Provinces, Finance Minister 
to the Government of India, Lt. Governor of 
Bengal and Governor of Bombay. His book, 
"India in 1880," gives perhaps the fullest and 
most comprehensive account of India as it actually 



l80 INDIA. 

is, that can anywhere be got. Thousands of 
Europeans have served under him. He says : 

** I have been acquainted with the missionary 
station throughout the length and breadth of the 
country. I believe that a more talented, zealous 
and able body of men than the Missionaries of 
India does not exist." * * * " I do not say 
there are no failures but the percentage of failure 
is as small as in any other departments of the 
public service." 

Of the character of native Christians he says ; 
" I do not claim for them any unusual display of 
Christian graces, but they behave as well on the 
average as Christians in any land. If you appeal 
to the magistrates in India they will give the 
native Christians everywhere a good character." 

"Again they have never scandalized their Chris- 
tianity. * * * We (3o not hear of apostates 
among the native Christians. When the Sepoy 
revolt and the subsequent war spread over the 
land, and many were tempted to apostatize, were 



INDIA. l8l 

threatened and exposed to danger, they stood firm 
to their faith, and there was no noteworthy 
instance of apostacy whatever." 

^ :|c ^ 4c 3|E 

As to the result of missionary expenditure he 
testifies : "As an old Finance Minister of India, 
I ought to know, if anybody does, when the 
money's worth is got by any operation, and having 
administered provinces which contain, first and 
last, no less than 105,000,000 of British subjects, 
that is, nearly half of British India, I say that, of 
all the departments I have ever administered, I 
never saw one more efficient than the missionary 
department; and of all the hundreds of thousands 
of officers I have had under my command, I have 
never seen a better .body of men than the Protes- 
tant missionaries, I say this also, that of all the 
departments I have administered, I have never 
known one in which a more complete result was 
got from the expenditure than in that great, that 
grand department which is represented by the 
Protestant missions." 



lS2 INDIA. 

Of the trustworthy character of missionary ' ■ 
returns, he remarks : " I say that of all the statis- 
tics that are published by the missionaries you 
have absolute, official verification ; that the census 
of the native Christians of India is as trustworthy 
as the census of the population of British India 
itself, that all the main facts upon which you rely 
if you give your subscriptions are as certain as 
any financial, or commercial, or political, or 
administrative fact whatever." 

The Pa// Ma// Gazette says : ** Statistics have 
established, in a startling and unexpected manner, 
that Christianity is a really living faith among the 
natives of India, and that it is spreading at a rate 
which was unsuspected by the general public. 
The report shows very honestly that the missionary 
work in India is an educational quite as much as 
a proselytising enterprise." 

A Late Governor of Ceylon, says : 

"I know of no country where missionary enter- 
prise is doing better work than here, or where 
there is less of the odium t/ieo/ogicum'* 



INDIA. 183 

The Government Report on Tinnevelly Dis- 
trict, 1 874, says : 

"The Protestant missions have made rapid strides 
in recent years in the conversion of the inhabit- 
ants to Christianity. 

Sir William Muir, late Lieut. Governor of the 
Northwest Provinces, says : 

"Thank God, a marvelous change has taken 
place within the last half century; and while to 
this happy result various agencies have contributed, 
a powerful influence — one might be bold to say 
the most powerful of all the influences at work — 
has been the missionary attitude of the Church 
in asserting for our holy faith its legitimate 
supremacy as the regenerator of mankind." 

« 4: * 4c 4( 

"Thousands have been brought over, and in an 
ever-increasing ratio, converts are being brought 
to Christianity. And they are not shams nor 
paper converts, but good and honest Christians 
and many of them of a high standard." 



184 INDIA. 

HINDRANCES. 

Twenty years after Gordon Hall's arrival at 
Bombay, he wrote that " the number of true con- 
verts from idolatry had been less than the number 
of valuable lives that had been sacrificed in the 
rescue." Now the number of Christian converts 
is doubling on itself with each decade, but the 
work is only fairly begun. The native Christian 
community can scarcely be said yet to be a recog- 
nized power in the land. Our diagram, showing 
the enormous disproportion of the non-Christian 
to the Christian population of the land, furnishes 
an ordeal for faith. We are dealing with forms of 
civilization that are hoary with age, with customs 
that have been grooved into the life, with preju- 
dices that have warped the mind, and with super- 
stitions that have awed the heart of millions of 
people for hundreds of generations and through 
centuries too remote for history. 

It is idle to think they can be uprooted in a 
day. Lord Lawrence has pointed out that the 



INDIA. 



185 



THE PEOPLE OF PVBIJ!. 




conquering hordes of Islam had easy work in 
proselyting the peoples they had subjugated in 
other lands, but eight centuries of Muhammadan 



1 86 INDIA. 

rule in India left the masses as strongly wedded 
as ever to their system of caste and to their relig- 
ious beliefs and rites. Christians should prepare 
for prolonged and powerful opposition. 

It were difficult to tell whether tenacity or pli- 
ability affords the greater obstruction to reform. 
The steam engine is a " democrat," and a new 
Juggernaut, crushing caste and defying prejudice, 
yet the Hindu has been accustomed, in this " Black 
Age," to modify his usages to meet exigences. No 
Brahman should, yet hundreds of them do, make 
their livelihood as writers. The grip of the twin 
tyrants custom and caste is only relieved in order 
to get a new hold. The steam engine speeds the 
missionary to his work, but thousands on thou- 
sands, who could not spare the time or endure the 
exposure of the old pilgrimage to famous shrines 
and bathing ghats, are borne as on wings to partici- 
pate in these ceremonies. The author has sat in 
railway carriages with hundreds of Hindus, who 
raised a shout like the noise of many waters on 
reaching specially sacred spots on the Ganges. 



INDIA. 1S7 

Our mission presses are multiplied, but we have 
no monopoly of this method of approach to the 
Indian mind. India skies are being darkened 
with leaves which are not " for the healing of the 
nation." Modern printing and publishing facilities 
are being utilized to make them a new and terrible 
energy for the dissemination of heathen and 
infidel beliefs. Hindus and Muhammadans are 
every year scattering thousands of pages in de- 
fense of their respective faiths. Publishing 
houses, with shrewd priests for writers and canvas- 
sers, find the publishing of evil books to be a 
lucrative business. One Hindu prince not long 
since caused the publication and distribution at 
his own expense of a million of tracts ; and a 
Muhammadan presented to a publishing house at 
Lucknow about ;^4,ooo to encourage the produc- 
tion of Muhammadan literature. Of the 103 
native newspapers published in the Northwest 
Provinces of India, all but two are antagonistic to 
Christianity. The burden of Hindu literature is 
the heroic deeds of heathen gods, with a coloring 



1 88 INDIA. 

of deceit and sensuality which panders to and 
cultivates the most immoral sentiments and lives. 



THE HOUR. 

1. The Hour and the Peril. — The question of 
success is not, however, to be determined in India. 
The peril lies nearer home, and is admirably 
pointed out by Sir Alfred Lyell in the following, 
the italics being ours : 

" Some may think that Christianity will, a sec- 
ond time in the world's history, step into the 
vacancy created by a great territorial empire, and 
occupy the tracks laid open by the upheaval of a 
whole continent to a new intellectual level. But 
the state of thoitght in Western Europe hardly 
encourages conjecture that India will receizfe from 
that quarter any such decisive impulse as that which 
overturned the decaying paganism of Greece and 
Romey 

In India all things are ready. Providence is 
long strides ahead of the laggard church of the 



INDIA. 189 

west. The ignorance and apathy of church re- 
garding the situation is the source of alarm. 
"The hour strikes" and we are not "on time." 

2. The Hour and the Privilege. — It is per- 
haps eighteen centuries since the church was chal- 
lenged with so remarkable an opportunity for 
advance as in India to-day. The whole common 
opinion is thrown up for a re-moulding, 
the whole common manners for re-adjusting, the 
whole common faith for re-questioning. Such 
periods in such societies are rare. The moulding 
power may, by simultaneous voluntary effort of 
the churches of the West, be made a Christianizing 
one. It is a case for race regeneration. So far, as 
Hinduism is concerned — and it represents more 
than three-fourths of the population of a territory 
larger than all Europe — never, since the Aryan 
race, with its peaceful and pastoral habits, first 
made its way into this peninsula, down through 
all the long line of its succeeding history — a his- 
tory replete with more of event than that of any 
people besides — never in all the long line of its 



IQO INDIA. 

full and overflowing history, has God so fused 
these masses for moulding by a Christian hand ; 
never has he given so high a commission concern- 
ing this people to the Christian church ; never 
were India's blind and bewildered masses flung so 
beseechingly before her, as now. Now, in a sense 
never known before, we may speak, and as at no 
other time, have chronic prejudices start aside, 
mute and meek, at our bidding ; now, we may 
touch, as with prophet power, the upturned skel- 
eton of the ages, and have it start into life. 

If the church will fling away her weapons 
because of the meagre statistics of individual con- 
versions, then had she better have never broken 
lance with India's packed society and patriarchal 
prejudices; but if she is willing to address her- 
self to the work of the world's redemption with 
that daring which knows no defeat, yet with that 
patience which waits the slow marchings of Provi- 
dence along the centuries, if she be but willing 
to do man's duty, in connection with God's oppor- 
tunity, then India, to-day, affords one of the ripest 



INDIA. 191 

and richest and rarest places for her tears and for 
her toil that ever she will find in all the Providence 
of God. 

3. The Hour and the Duty. — The Master 
himself guarantees our success. It is a tempting 
prize that the rich offerings at the shrines of 
Southern India may be turned to the treasury of 
the Lord ; that the temples of Benares, the 
mosques of Delhi, and the golden shrines of 
Umritsur shall be given to the worship of our 
Aratar and Prophet-king. 

But " suppose we had no success," asked the 
now sainted Bishop Thomson, " hath not God 
commanded and shall not we obey ? * * * Can 
we see man debased, self-corrupted, self- mutilated, 
self-imbruted, self- damned, and not speak? 
Though no man hear and no man pity, you must 
plead, though you tell your truth and sorrow to 
the stones." 

India is too fair a gem to adorn any but the 
brow of Christ. It was one of her own sons who, 
touching but the hem of Christianity's garment, 



192 INDIA. 

said : " None but Jesus ; none but Jesus ; none but 
Jesus ever deserved this bright, this precious dia- 
dem, India ; and Christ shall have it." 



THE APPEAL. 

The great council of missionaries in Calcutta, at 
the close of i88[, makes the following appeal to 
Christians in Europe and America : 

** This conference is deeply impressed with the 
vastness of the work which remains to be per- 
formed before India can be won for Christ. Even 
in the great centers of population, where there is 
the largest number of missionaries, there are far 
fewer laborers than are imperatively required ; 
while many districts, with more than a million of 
inhabitants, are left to the care of but one or two ; 
and other tracts of country, equally populous and 
yearly becoming more accessible, have not a single 
Christian missionary resident among them. From 
all parts of the Indian Empire the cry isf'heard 
that there are abundant openings for labor, but^no 



INDIA. 193 

laborers to take it up ; and the numerous repre- 
sentations from all parts of the mission field in 
India, Burmah, and Ceylon, who are here present, 
feel that an earnest appeal must be made to the 
churches in Europe and America for more mis- 
sionaries, both men and women. They therefore 
earnestly commend this subject to the prayerful 
attention of all the home churches and societies ; 
and in the great Master's name, they urge with all 
the emphasis in their power, the necessity of every 
effort being made to send forth a largely increased 
number of laborers into this vast and most 
important field which is * already white unto the 
harvest.' " 

It is something, it is much, that a Christian queen 
rules India, that Christian legislators formulate 
Christian laws for the land, that Christian courts 
administer the principles of Christian ethics, and 
that Christian armies protect all the ambassadors 
and disciples of Christ, but it remains for the 
Christian church to see to it that 

India is given to Christ for "a possession." 



APPENDIX. 



TABLE I. 

MISSIONARY SOCIETIES AT WORK IN INDIA. 

1. American Baptist Missionary Union. 

2. Karen Home Mission. 

3. American Free- Will Baptist Missionary Society. 

4. Baptist Missionary Society and Indian Home Mission. 

5. General Baptist Misionary Society. 

6. Canadian Baptist Telugu Mission. 

7. Strict Baptist Mission. 

8. South Australian Baptist Missionary Society. 

9. Basle Missionary Society. 

10. Society for the Propogation of the Gospel. 

11. Church Missionary Society. 

12. Oxford Brotherhood of St. Paul. 

13. The Bishops Mission. 

14. Missions under the Local Clergy. 

15. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. 

16. London Missionary Society. 

17. Foreign Mission Board of the American Lutheran Church, 

18. Danish Lutheran Missionary Society of Copenhagen. 

19. Gossner's Missionary Society at Berlin. 

20. Herrmansburg (Hanover) Mission. 

21. Lutheran Mission at Leipsic. 

22. Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Mission. 

23. Wesleyan Missionary Society. 

24. Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society (American.) 
26. American Free Methodists. 

26. Episcopal Moravians or United Brethren. 

27. Society of Friends. 

28. Church of Scotland. 

29. Free Church of Scotland. 

30. United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. 

31. United Presbyterian Church of the United States. 

32. Presbyterian Church in England. 

33. Presbyterian Church in Ireland. 

34. Presbyterian Church of the United States. 

35. Reformed Church (Dutch) of America. 

36. Original Secession Synod of Scotland. 

37. German Evangelical Missionary Society in the United States. 

38. Canadian Presbyterian. 

39. Welsh Calvanistic Methodist. 

40. Society for Promoting Female Education in the East. 

41. Indian Normal School and Female Instruction. 

42. Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. 

43. Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Ladies' Association. 

44. The Woman's Union Missionary Society (American.) 

45. Church of Scotland Ladies' Association. 

46. Baptist Zenana Mission. 

47. Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society. 

48. Christian Vernacular Education Society. 

49. Isolated or Individual Missions. 



196 



INDIA. 



TABLE II. 

LOCATIONS OCCUPIED BY MISSIONARY SOCIETIES (1881). 

The number following the name of the locality corresponds 
with the number opposite the name of the Society in Table I. 
Societies whose number follows a name are carrying on work in 
that province or locality. 



BENGAL PRESIDENCY. 

1. Calcutta and Environs — 4, 10, 
11. 16, 23, 24. 28, 29, 42, 43, 44, 45, 
46. 49. 

2. West Bengal— 4, 11, 16, 23, 29, 
32, 42. 

3. Central Bengal— 4, 11, 16, 23, 32. 

4. East Bengal— 4. 8, 10, 11, 37, 39, 
46, 49. 

5. Assam and Cooch Behar— 1, 4, 
10, 11, 28. 

6. Orissa— 3, 5, 7, 11, 40. 

7. Chota Nagpore ( including 
Kols and Santals) —4, 10, 11, 19, 
29, 49. 

8. Behar -4, 10, 11, 19. 

NOR TH WEST PR O VINCES 

9. East— 4, 10, 11, 16, 19, 23, 24, 34, 
41.44. 

10. West— 4, 10, 11, 34, 41, 42, 43. 

11. Garhwal, DehraDoon, Kam- 
aon— 11, 16, 24, 34. 

12. Rohilcund— 11, 24. 

13. OUDH— 11,28,24,^1. 

14. PUNJAB— A, 10, 11, 28, 31. 34, 
40, 41, 42, 48. 

15. CASHMERE— 4, 11, 26, 28, 34. 

16. RAJPUTA N A— \l,Zl. 

17. CENTRAL INDIA— 25, SS. 
18 BERARS—U, 49. 

19. NIZAM'S DOMINIONS-!, 

10, 11.23,24,28,29 

20. CENTRAL PROVINCES— 

11, 22, 24, 27, 29. 36, 37, 42. 

BOMB A Y PRESIDENCY. 

21. Scind-11, 24 42. 

22. Gujerat— 33. 

23. Khandeish— 11. 



24. Ahmednaggar— 10,11,15,41,48. 

25. Bombay City— 4, 10, 11, 15, 24, 

28, 29, 41. 

MADRAS PRESIDENCY. 

26. Poona— 4, li, 13, 15, 29, 45. 

27. Sholapur, Satara Kolhapur, 
Ratnagiri— 10, 15, 34. 

28. Belgaum, Dharwar, North 
Canara— 9, 11, 16. 

29. Bellary— 1, 10, 16, 24. 

30 Mysore— 10, 16, 21, 23, 49. 

31. South Canara and Coorg— 9. 

32. Malabar, Cochin— 9, 11. 

33. Travaocore-li, 16, 42. 
.34. Tinnevelly— 7, 10, 42, 49. 

35. Madura-10, 11, 15, 21. 

36. Panducutta— 21. 

37. Trichinopoli.Tanjore, Coim- 
batore— 10, 16, 21. 23 

38. Nilgiris Salem— 9, 10, 11, 16, 
23 35 

39. Arcot— 10, 18, 20, 21. 28, 35. 

40. Chingleput— 7, 11, 16, 23, 29. 

41. Madras— 1, 10. 15, 16, 21, 23, 24, 
28, 29, 42 

42. Nellore— 1,20, 29. 

43. Cuddahpah, Karnul— 10, 16, 
35. 

44. Kistna District— 11, 17, 42. 

45. Godavery— 6, 17, 49. 

46. Visagapatam, Ganjam— 6, 16. 

47. BURMA — Andaman Is- 
lands— 11. 

48. Tennasserim (Tavoy and 
Maulmain)— 1. 

49. Pegu and Independent Bur- 
ma (Rangoon Bassein and 
Maulmain)-1, 10, 24, 49. 

50. CEYLON— I, 4, 10, 11, 15, 23. 



INDIA. 



197 



GENERAL SUMMARY OE RESULTS. 

1851 1861 1871 1881 

STATIONS. 

In India 222 319 423 566 

In Burma No returns 18 J* 32 

In Ceylon 40 57 74 115 

Total 262 394 "522 "716 

FOREIGN AND EURASIAN ORDAINED AGENTS. 

In India 339 479 488 586 

In Burma No returns 22 29 36 

In Ceylon 34 36 31 36 

Total 373 537 548 "658 

NATIVE ORDAINED AGENTS. 

In India 21 97 225 461 

In Burma No returns 46 77 114 

In Ceylon 8 42 79 66 

Total 29 18.5 381 "674 

NATIVE liAY PREACHERS. 

In India 493 1,266 1,985 2,488 

In Burma No returns 411 359 368 

In Ceylon 58 102 184 132 

Total 551 1,779 2,528 2,988 

CHURCHES OR CONGREGATIONS. 

In India 267 291 2,278 3,6.50 

In Burma No returns 352 353 530 

In Ceylon 43 224 341 3.58 

Total 310 867 2,972 4,-5.38 

NATIVE CHRISTIANS. 

In India 91.092 138,731 .224,258 417,372 

In Burma No returns 59,366 62,729 75,510 

In Ceylon 11,859 15,273 31,376 35,708 

Total 102,951 213,370 318,363 528,590 

COMMUNICANTS. 

In India 14,661 24,976 52,816 113,325 

In Burma No returns 18,439 20,514 .24,929 

In Ceylon 2,645 3,859 5,164 ' 6,843 

Total 17,306 47,274 78,494 145,097 

N. c. CONTRIBUTIONS (in the year not decade). 

In India about 40,000 85,121 121,929 

In Burma " " 12,000 42,736 69,170 

In Ceylon " " 8,000 31,267 37,418 

Total Rs about 60.000 159,124 228,517 



198 



INDIA. 



MALE EDUCATION. 

1851 1861 1871 

FOREIGN AND EURASIAN MALE TEACHERS. 

In India No returns no returns 134 

In Burma " " 12 

In CeyJon " " 6 



Total (1871 includes Preachers) 152 

native;christian teachers. 

In India No returns no returns 1,901 

In Burma " " 77 

In Ceylon " " 316 

Total 2,294 

THEOIiOGICAIi AND TRAINING PUPILS. 

In India No returns no returns 1,205 



In Burma. 
In Ceylon. 



Total. 



ANGIiO-VERNACXTLiAR SCHOOIiS. 

In India 91 162 

In Burma No returns 8 

In Ceylon 37 23 

Total 128 193 

ANGLO-VERNACULAR PUPILS. 

In India 12,401 21,090 

In Burma No returns 586 

In Ceylon 1,675 1,657 



356 
57 

1,618 



347 
13 
52 

412 



40.075 

836 

2.604 



Total. 



14,076 23,333 

VERNACULAR SCHOOLS. 
1,099 1,353 



In India 

In Burma No returns 

In Ceylon 246 



249 
209 



Total 



1,345 1,811 

VERNACULAR PUPILS. 

In India 38,661 36,386 

In Burma No returns 3,778 

In Ceylon 9,126 8,226 



1,912 
180 
149 

2.241 



54.241 

4,037 

7,':)61 



Total 



In India .. 
In Burma. 
In Ceylon. 



47,787 48,390 

TOTAL MALE PUPILS. 

52,850 60,026 

No returns 4,802 

11,005 10,047 



95,521 

5,229 

10,622 



1881 



98 

3 

15 

116 



3,481 
194 
670 

4,345 



1,235 
86 
56 

1,377 



385 

28 
59 

472 



45,249 

850 

4,104 



43,515 50,203 



3,020 
248 
435 

3,703 



84,760 

6,287 

26,371 



66,239 117,418 



131,244 

7,223 

30,531 



Total. 



63,855 



74,875 111,372 168,99« 



INDIA. 



199 



WOMAN'S WORK. 

185J 1861 1871 1881 

FOREIGN AND EURASIAN FEMALE AGENTS. 

In India No returns No returns 370 479 

JSg^SS:::::::::;:::::::::::::::: !_ 1 1 1 

Total 423 541 

NATIVE CHRISTIAN FEMALE AGENTS. 

In India No returns No returns 837 1,643 

In Burma " " ^6 71 

iS Ceylon...... JL _1 J^ ^ 

Total 967 1,944 

BOARDING SCHOOLS FOR GIRLS. 

In India 86 108 26 155, 

In Burma No returns 3 18 

In Ceylon 5 5 1 b 

Total.... 91 116 28 171 

BOARDING PUPILS— GIRLS. 

In India 2,274 3,912 536 6,379 

In Burma No returns 103 21 388 

In Ceylon 172 145 10 266 

Total 2^46 4,160 567 6,983 

DAY SCHOOLS FOR GIRLS. 

In India 285 261 664 1.120 

In Burma No returns 2 8 1 

IS Ceylon _J^ }^ J}1 2^ 

Total 355 373 789 1,281 

DAY PUPILS— GIRLS. 

In India 8-919 12,057 24.078 40,897 

In Burma No returns 963 995 1,147 

In Ceylon.".' 2,630 3,844 3,943 7,506 

Total 11,549 16,864 29,016 49,550 

ZENANA HOUSES. 

In India . — — '^'^^ 7,522 

In Burma ;; .. - ^ 

In Ceylon i-^^vi 

Total ~ ~ 1,300 9,566 

ZENANA PUPILS. 

In India - - 1.997 9,132 

In Burma *' ,', — 

In Ceylon _1 _1 — 

Total 1.997 9,228 

TOTAL FEMALE PUPILS. 

In India 11,193 15.969 26,611 56,408 

In Burma No returns 1,066 1,016 1,48.5 

In Ceylon..: .....:....! 2,802 3,989 3,953 7,868 

Grand Total.Female Pupils 13.995 21,024 31,580 65,761 



200 INDIA. 

SUMMARY OF PUPILS IN ALL SCHOOLS. 
ToTAii PUPILS, MALE AND FEMALE (not incl'd'g Sunday Schools.) 

ISSl 1861 1871 1881 

In India 64,043 75,995 122,132 187,652 

In Burma No returns 5,868 6.245 8,708 

In Ceylon 13,807 14,036 14,575 38,399 

Grand Total, Male and 

Female Pupils 77,850 94,899 142,952 234,759 

TOTAL SUNDAY SCHOOL PUPILS. 

In India No returns no returns no ret'rns 61,688 

In Burma " '• •' 4 040 

In Ceylon " " '« 17*593 

Total Sunday School Pupils 83,321 



ROMAN CATHOLICS IN INDIA. (1877). 

"Statement prepared for the (Ecumenical Council at Rome. 

Vicariates Apostolic. Population. Rom. Catholics. 

Agra 42,068,103 13,914 

Patna 38,498,501 8,043 

Central Bengal or Barhampur 8,000,000 659 

Western Bengal or Calcutta 10,397,000 10,350 

Eastern Bengal or Dacca 9,261,000 8.000 

Ava and Pegu 3,083.000 8,700 

Bombay and Puna 14,888,000 51,000 

Vizaeapatam 12,605,000 8,390 

Haidarabad 7,020,(100 5,200 

Madras 7,283,000 41,996 

Mysor 4,000,000 20,000 

Coimbator 1,500,000 17,000 

Pondicnerry (Vicarite Apostolic) 4,100,000 113,000 

Pondicherry (Apostolic Prefecture)... 230,000 3,050 

Madura or Trichinapalli 4,226,000 168,800 

Quilon * 700,000 64,000 

Virapalli 300,000 270.000 

Mangalor 2,000,000 54,000 

Goa 470,000 230,000 

1,076,102 

Note.— The Roman Catholic Clergy of Hindustan comprise an 
Archbishop of Goa, nineteen Bishops who are Vicars Apostolic, 
815 Priests, beside the Clergy resident in the Island of Goa. There 
are 146 parishes, 172 districts, 70 military stations, 2,141 churches 
and chapels. The whole episcopate is European, and also almost 
all the clergy of the second order. 



INDIA. 20 1 

BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

[Books on India in its various phases are too numerous to cata- 
logue here. Scrantom, Wetmore & Co., 10 Stale St., Rochester, N. 
Y., will aid purchasers to procure books mentioned in this list as 

far as practicable.] 

RE1.IGIONS. 

(Colebrook) Essays on Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus. 

(Herklott) Qanoon-e-Islam : or Customs of the Mussalmans of 

India. 
(Mtiir) Liife of Mahomet 4 Vols. 
(Muir) Original Sanskrit Texts 4 Vols. (English and Roman 

Sanskrit.) 
(Max mnller) Ancient Sanskrit Literature. 
(Dosabhoy) Framjee) The Parsees. 

(Dr. Hans') Essays on Language^ Religion, &c,, of the Parsees. 
(Dr. Wilson) Parsee Religion. 
(Thomson) The Bhagavat Gita. English, 
(Coleman) Mythology of the Hindus. 
(Hongliton) Laws of Manu. 
(Hardy) Manual of Buddhism. 
(Wllkins) Hindu Mythology Vedic and Puranic. 
(Macdonald) The Vedic Religion: or The Creed and Practice 

of The Indo-Aryans 3(X)0 Years Ago. 
(Banerjea) Dialogues on Hindu Philosophy. 
(Hunter) Indian Mussulmans. 
(Lassen) Indische Alterthumskunde, 3 Vols. 
(Sell) The Faith of Islam. 
(Whitney) Oriental and Linguistic Studies. 

lUISSlOKS. 

(T. J, Scott) Missionary Life in India. (See Adv.) 

( Wm. Bntler) Land of the V eda. (See Adv.) 

(Wm. Taylor) Four Years in India. 

(Robblns) Hand Book of India and British Burmah. (See Adv.) 

(Sberring:) History of Protestant Missions in India 1706-1871. 

(Badley) Indian Missionary Directory. 

(Mason) Burmah and its People. 

(Mrs. Mason) Civilising Mountain Men. 

(DnflT) India and Indian Missions. 

(Hons^b) Christianity in India. 

(Reid) History of Methodist Episcopal Missions Vol. 2. 



202 INDIA. 

(ilnderson) History of American Board Missions in India. 

( Wilder) Mission Schools in India. 

(Bf*inbrid?e) 'Around the World Tour of Christian Missions. 

See Adv.) 

(Kiag) The Burman Mission. 

(Hon^btron) Women of the Orient. 

(Hau'ser) The Orient and its People. 

( Wayland) Life of Judson, 

(Keadricb) Life of Emily C. Judson. 

(M:arstiman) Life of Carey, Marshman and Ward. 

(Venn) Life of Francis Xavier. 

(A. Kins') Life of Geo. Dana Boardman. (See Adv.) 

(Scadder) Life of Rev. John Scudder. 

(Geo. Simitb) Life of Dr. Duff. 

(Brittain) A Woman's Talks About India. 

(Arthur) Missions in the Mysore. 

(Badley) Indian Missionary Directory. 

(Bainbrid^e) Along the Lines at^ the Front. 

(Carpenter) Self Support in Karen Bassein Mission. 

(Smitb, S. F.) Missionary Sketches : History of Baptist Mission- 
ary Union. 

(Wason) Story of a Working Man's Life. 

(Chaplin) Our Gold Mine: Story of American Baptist Missions 
in Burmah. 

(Cupples) Memoir of Mrs. Valentine (Jeypore). 

(Ellis) Our Eastern Sisters and their Missionary Helpers. 

(Weitbreicht) The Women of India, and Christian Work in the 
Zenanas. 

(Clon^h) From Darkness to Light : Story of the Telueu Mission. 

(Ijnther) The Vintons and the Karens. 

(Bixby) My Child-Life in Burmah. 

Reports of the Missionary Conferences held at Bangalore, 
Lahore and Calcutta. 

Indian Evangelical Review (quarterly), Calcutta. 

Indian Witness (weekly), Calcutta. 

MI!«CEI.T.A]yEOUS. 

(^larshman) History of India, 3 Vols. 

(Hnnter) A Brief History of the Indian People. 

(Hunter) Annals of Rural Bengal. 

(Sir Richard Temple) India in 1880. 

Calcutta Review. The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Ben- 
gal, and also Bombay Branch . 



INDEX. 



Aborigines: customs, 9; superstitions, 41. 

Ancestor Worship, 30. 

Appeal of Calcutta Missionary Conference, 162. 

Architecture, 11. 

Aryan, civilization, 1 1 ; languages, 1 8. 

Brahmanism, 43 ; related to Buddhism, 43. 

Brahmoism, leaders, stages, principles of, 169. 

Buddhism, 77 ; similarities and dissimilarities with Brahmanism, 
78; unsatisfying, 30. 

Burmah, Judson in, 109 ; native Christians of, 115 ; map of, 100, 

Carey, William, 197. 

Caste, 28 ; compensations of, 34 ; destroys individuality, 34 ; 
divisions of labor and, 32 ; hereditary, 31 ; motives of, 30 ; obstructs 
progress, 35 ; origin of, 30 ; principles of, 29 ; property and, 30. 

Child-Marriage, 97. 

Child- Widov^7S, 71. 

Christianity in India, grow^th of, 112 ; statistical tables of; triumph ofj 
anticipated by heathen, 140. 

Christians, native, 113; rate of increase, 115; secret partial-Chris- 
tians, 122; and Christian communities, 132; Syrian, 103. 

Creation, Hindu theory of, 48. 

Danes, missions of, 106. 

Demon-Worship 42. 

Diagram of Religions, 185. 

" " Comparative Populations, 6. 

" " Comparative Growth of Christian Community, 155. 



204 INDIA. 

Education, 40 ; relative growth of Christian, 155. 
statistics of, in all missions. 

Element-Worship in Vedas, 43. 

Ethnology of India, 9. 

Edwards, Sir Herbert, and missions, 175. 

Frere, Sir Bartle, opinions of, 132, 164, 176. 

Ganges, bathing in, 51 ; exposure of dying on, 53; origin and ex- 
piatory power of, 51. 

Government of India, on child-marriages, 68 ; child-widows, 70, 
education of woman, 155 ; Hindu festivals, 158; infanticide, 65 ; 
influence of women, 159; Muhammadans in Bengal, 91; pil- 
grimages, 59 ; missions change in view concerning, 161 ; report to 
parliament, 178; on widow-burning, 161. 

Hindrances to Progress of Christianity, 184. 

Hinduism, degrades woman, 65 ; deities, debasing worship of, 57 ; 
disintegration of, 166; fetishism of, 155; licentiousness of, 62; 
moral failure of, 57 ; pilgrimages and their cost, 60; sacred books 
of, 44. 

Hindu Philosophy, schools and principles of, 46. 

History of India, 26 ; of ancient commerce, 20. 

Hour, the peril, privilege and duties of, 183. 

Hunter, W. W., on Jagannath festival, 60. 

India, Christianity in, 103; climate, 2; commerce, 5, 20, 24; ex- 
tent, 103 ; internal history of, 26 ; key to Asia, 24 ; physical fea- 
tures of, 8 ; place in history, 20 ; Romanism in, 104 ; seasons of, 3. 

Infanticide, 65. 

Islam, 89. 

Jagannath, pilgrimages, cost of, 59. 

Jains, 79. 

Judson, Adoniram, 109. 

Kali, worship of, 58. 

Karens, spirit-worship, 9 ; traditions, 95 ; self-support among 



INDIA. 205 

lianguages, 16; map of, 18. 

Lawrence, Sir John, on conversion of India, 162; on killing wid- 
ows and lepers, 162 ; missionary work, 183. 

Leaders, possibilities of native, 154. 
"Light of Asia," 80. 

I^yell, Sir Alfred, on Brahmanism and Brahmoism, 55, 166, 172; 
on conversion of India, 186. 

Martyn, Henry, 107. 

Map of Burmah, 100 of India ; political divisions and railroads. 
See frontispiece — of languages of India, 18. 

Marshman, 107. 

Mass Movement Towards Christianity, 147. 

McLeod, Sir Donald, opinion of, 176. 

Missionaries' testimony to, 176. 

Missionary Conference, Bangalore, 184; Calcutta, 192. 

Missions, Danish, 106; early Protestant of ; Burmah, 109; of In- 
dia, 107 ; Romanist, 104. 

Muller, Max, on Buddhism, 76 ; resources of India, 3 ; religious 
reforms, 164. 

MuUens, Joseph, D. D., 1I3. 

Muhammadans, 89; Hinduised, 92; increase of, 91; moral influ- 
ence of, 93; unsettlement of, 173; widows of, 93; women and 
their seclusion, 94. 

Muir, Sir William, opinion of, 183. 

Mutiny, changes wrought by, 37. 

Bfanak, Baba, 93. 

Napier, Lord, opinion of, 177. 

Opinions of Eminent Authorities, on India missions ; Edwards, Sir 
Herbert, 175; Frere, Sir Bartle, Indian government, 178; Law- 
rence, Lord, 1 74 ; McLeod, Sir Donald, 1 76 ; Muir, Sir William, 
183; Muller, Max, 164; Napier, Lord, 177; Pall Mall Gazette, 
182; Temple, Sir Richard, 479; Travelyan, Sir Charles, 153. 



206 INDIA. 

Pantheism, 48. 

Parsi, 83 ; catechism, 88 ; customs, 84 ; sacred books, 86. 

Philosophy, Hindu, 47. 

Pilgrimages, cost of, etc., 59. 

Political Divisions of India, 7 ; See map. 

Population of India, 7, according to religion, 100, 185. 

Press, use of, 87. 

Progress in India, 40 ; 160. 

Races of India, 9. 

Reforms, Hindu, 160; Brahmoism. 

Religion, of Aborigines, 41 ; Buddhists, 80 ; Hindu, 46 ; Moslems, 

89 ; Parsis, 83. 
Results of Missionary work, 160, 196-99. 
Revivals, great among Karens, 147 ; Santals, 147 ; Shanars, 148 ; 

in Acrot, 151 ; in Ongole, 149. 
Romanists, Missions of, 104, 199. 
Roy, Ram Mohim, 169. 

Sacred Books, Hindu, 44 ; Parsi, 84 ; Sikhs, 97. 
Samaj, Adi ; Brahmo ; Sadharan, 171. (See statistics.) 
Schwartz, Christian F., 106. 
Self-Support, 117, 196. 
Semitic Peoples, 14; civilization, 15. 
Sen, Keshub Chunder, 170. 
Sikhs, 97. 

Sin, expiation of in Ganges, 51. 

Social Order, 28; changes, 37, 108, 163, 170, 186, 189. 
Statistical Tables of Missions, etc., 196-99. 
Sunday Schools, 117. 
Superstitions, 42, 92. 
Suttee, 162. 
Syrian Christians, 103. 



INDIA. 207 

Tables, statistical, of religions, 100 ; of Native Christian, Com- 
municants, Schools, 196-7. 

Tagore, Babu Debendi-anath, 169. 

Tamils, 1 1 ; Language, 19. 

Temple, Sir Richard, 179. 

Temples, Hindu decaying, 168. 

Travelyan, Sir Charles, Conversion of Hindu, 153. 

Turanian, races, 9 ; customs, suppostitions, lO. 

Vedantism, 50. 

Vedas, 43. 

Vedic Forms of Faith, 43. 

Village Republics, 80. 

Ward, William, 107. 

Widow-Burning, voluntary, 159; prohibited, 161. 

Widows, 70; disgrace of, 71 ; Moslem, 93 ; number of, 72. 

Williams, Monier, on Jains, 79. 

Wilson, John, on conversion of India, 103 ; Hinduism, 53 ; Parsi- 
ism, 84. 

Woman, ability and influence of native, 74, 158 ; degraded by Hin- 
duism, 64, 65, 73 ; by Muhammadanism, 94 ; illiteracy of, 69 ; 
intellectual ability, 74 ; seclusion, 68, 94. 

Woman's Missionary Work, 116, 158, 198. 

Xavier, Francis, 104. 

Zananas or Zenanas, 68; work in, 198. 

Zend Avesta, 86. 

Ziegenbalg, B., 106. 

Zoroastrianism, $2- 



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MRS. J. T. GRACEY, 

With an Introduction by Bishop I. W. Wiley, M. D., LL. D. 
The above may be had postpaid for 30 cents per copy of MRS. 
J. T. GRACEY, Rochester, N. Y. 



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THE GOSPEL IN ALL LANDS. 

16 Pages Every Week. 

It gives an account of the People of all Lands and of Mission 
Work among them and its volumes become an Encyclopaedia of 
Missions. It is the only Missionary Weekly published and is in- 
dispensable to all those who wish to keep iaformed as to what 
advancement is being made by the Gospel of Christ. It is the 
representative of all Churches and Societies. 

Price six cents a week : Two Dollars a year. Eugene R, 
Smith, Publisher, 114 W. Baltimore-st., Baltimore, Md. 

MISSIONARY WORLD. 

The "Missionary World" has eight pages monthly. Each 
number contains a Missionary Catechism ; an account of the 
Habits. Customs, Beliefs, etc., of people in Heathen Lands, show- 
ing their need of the Gospel; Interesting Stories that will 
awaken and develop the Missionary Spirit among Young People; 
from five to ten illustrations, etc. One copy, twenty-five cents a 
year. Ten or more copies to the address of one person, each fif- 
teen cents ; to the address of different persons, each twenty cents 
a year. Editions are published for the Methodist Episcopal 
Church,Protestant Episcopal Church.Southern Methodist Church, 
and Lutheran Church. Eui^ene R.Smith, Publisher, Baltimore. 

THE LITTLE MISSIONAR V. 

Evangelical — Undenominational. 

"The Little Missionary" is a four page monthly, containing 
pictures, stories about heathen lands and people, and stories that 
will increase the interest of the children in Missions. One copy 
twenty-five cents a year. Six copies, fifty cents a year. Twenty 
or more copies to the address of one person, each six cents a year; 
to difi"erent addresses, each fifteen cents a year. Address 

Eugene R. Smith, 114 Baltimore Street, Baltimore, Md. 

The Missionary Year Book, published by the "Gospel in All 
Lands," is an invaluable aid in keeping posted on the progress of 
missions throughout the world. It gives a full list of American 
and foreign societies, when organized, number of workers and 
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published by Eugene R. Smith, Baltimore. There is no other 
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information in regard to Protestant Missionary work. Price 25 
cents,.— Central Christian Advocate. 



VI 



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BOOKS ON MISSION FIELDS. 

CHINA AND JAPAN.— Illustrated. 16rao, $1.— Bishop I, W. Wiley 
gives in this book the results of his observations during his 
episcopal tours in these two countries. His having been a 
missionary in China twenty-flve years before gives a special 
interest to his observations. 

INDIA AND BURMAH— Illustrated. 16mo, SI. Rev. W. E. Rob- 
bins, missionary, has put into this volume more information 
in regard to these mission fields than can be found even in 
much larger works. 

MISSIONARY LIFE IN INDIA.— 12mo, $1.50.— Rev. T. J. Scott, D. D., 
missionary, presents here an interesting account of mission 
work in tlie villages of India. 

WOMEN OF THE ORIENT.— Illustrated. 12mo, 51.50.— Rev. R. C. 
Houghton, D. D., visited, with Bishop Harris, the frequented 
parts of Asia, and gives a lively and faithful portraiture of the 
Ml omen of Oriental countries. 

ORIENTAL MISSIONS.— Two Volumes. 12mo. $2.— The letters of 
Bishop Edwar<l Thomson from Bulgaria, India, and China. 

ROUND THE WORLD.— Two Volumes. 12mo. $2.- The letters of 
Bishop Calvin Kingsley, written during his episcopal tour to 
the Oriental missions— his last writings. 

LIVINGSTON IN AF«^ICA,— Illustrated. 16mo SI.— A. condensed 
account of the missionary explorer's travels, by S. A. W. 

' Jewett, D. D. 

W/lIiDEN & STC>WE. Western Methodist Book Concern, 
Cincinnati— 190 West Fourth St. St. Louis— 1101 Olive Street. 



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MISSIONARY CONCERT EXERCISE 



FOR USB IN 



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Prepared for the Publisher by 



REV. J. T. GRACEY, D. D. 



This Service is particularly adapted for special Missionary 
seasons and anniversaries. Send for sample copy. 



PRIDE, 50 €TS. PER 100. 



S. WHYBRKIV, Publisher, 



S7 fVest Itlajn Htreet^ Rochester, N. T. 



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SCRANTOM, WETMORE & CO., 

10 STATE ST., ROCHESTER, N. Y, 



General Booksellers & Stationers, 



CARRY A LARGE LINE OF 



Theological &. Standard Literature 

in all Branches and 
4T THE I.OWEST PRI€E^i. 

They will fill orders for the publications named in the Catalogue 

of books in this volume, both American and foreign 

importing the latter when necessary. 



SCRANTOM, WETMORE & CO., 

10 STATE ST., ROCHESTER, N. Y. 



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